GEORGIA STRAIGHT, Canada (British Columbia)

    Conceived as an anti-establishment alternative to Vancouver’s conservative daily newspapers, the GEORGIA STRAIGHT VANCOUVER FREE PRESS was born on the eve of the Summer of Love, on 5 May 1967.
    From its very first issue, it showed itself to be a rebel with many causes, ruffling feathers and proving its mettle by tweaking the political powers-that-be. In the pages of GEORGIA STRAIGHT, aldermen, mayors and premiers have always all been fair game.
   Raided by the police and fined for obscenity in its early days, GEORGIA STRAIGHT soon found itself banned from distribution on city streets. Willing printers became difficult to find. The paper’s founder, poet and UBC math student Dan McLeod, was even briefly jailed. Despite the difficulties and harassment, GEORGIA STRAIGHT became the first major Vancouver newspaper to give voice to the nascent environmental movement.
   In 2020, the McLeod family sold the GEORGIA STRAIGHT to Media Central Corporation. In 2022, it was sold to Overstory Media Group, which owns and operates numerous community publications across Canada.
    It is now a free Canadian weekly news and entertainment newspaper published in a large "tabloid" format by the Vancouver Free Press Publishing Corp.; it is delivered to newsboxes, post-secondary schools, public libraries and a large variety of other locations. (https://www.straight.com/history)

    In the late 1960s, GEORGIA STRAIGHT became quite famous among Bob Dylan fans for its early publication of the book TARANTULA, several years before its official release in 1971; here is the story:

    Starting late August 1968, GEORGIA STRAIGHT published a series of excerpts of Bob Dylan's book; you can see below two September 1968 issues, with part 3 and 4 of the series:

     
September 6-12 1968, Tarantula part 3

     
September 13-19 1968, Tarantula part 4

      The publication of the excerpts was stopped in October 1968, after the magazine had received this warning letter from Bob Dylan's lawyers:

       ...but this was not the end of the story: two years later, in December 1970, GEORGIA STRAIGHT published the whole book as a special 16-page supplement, on 3 columns with illustrations:

    

TARANTULA, supplement, 2-9 December 1970

... with two questions and answers to readers on the back cover:

9-16 December 1970 [0326] (with Tarantula on his head) Thank you to Eric Galzi

1971 or 1972 'Dylan interview by Weberman' (larger image requested)

January 1974 [0326]

Leonard Cohen reading Vol.13 # 569, 20-27 October 1978
(image of the front cover requested)