Seen here is the front cover of The Jubilee Show souvenir program, a musical extravaganza held in July of 1946 for the city’s Diamond Jubilee. The artist responsible for the cover art is H. Edwards. I did try to find out more about H. Edwards, but alas I was unsuccessful. While the cover does look rather amateur or “high school yearbookish”, it was fairly imaginative placing the ghost of George Vancouver in the sky above us. And “Tomorrow’s Vancouver” on the back cover was quite prophetic with all the high density tall skyscrapers echoing the totem poles of the past! He’s even included foreshadowing of an inner-city freeway interchange!

I was able to find a bit of media coverage which mentioned the star of the show Eddie Cantor opening the Jewish old age home, but even more remarkable is the newspaper which ran the article. The masthead of The Jewish Western Bulletin (predecessor to the Jewish Independent) established October 9, 1930, bears an uncanny resemblance to that of my own online publication, Illustrated Vancouver!

The similarity above is purely coincidental, but I was quite obviously channeling newspaper mastheads of yesteryear. Keen viewers might also recognize another inspiration used in my design which I have largely kept secret until now. The distinctive Illustrated Vancouver script is based on that very famous cola company we are all familiar with. I purchased the font American Pop from MyFonts, and after a bit of tweaking, kerning, and customizing the capital letterforms, it was complete!

Finally, anyone looking to own a copy of this program might still find one for sale at Antiquarius books, a bookstore that was previously located in the Dominion Building in downtown Vancouver, now solely selling books on the Internet (from Falkland, British Columbia).