For 77 years, Quill & Quire has been the magazine of the Canadian book trade and a comprehensive source of industry news, book reviews, and author profiles.

Each Friday, Quillblog will dust off an old volume and take a look at how life in the Canadian publishing industry has changed (and how it’s stayed the same).

This week we take a time machine back 40 years, to February 1972, when Q&Q ran this cartoon alongside a story about the launch of McClelland & Stewart’s New Canadian Library five-pack series.

We’re not sure if the scruffy man in the illustration is a reference to M&S publisher Jack McClelland, whose “coat of many authors” is now an iconic symbol of Canadian publishing, or his notorious methods of selling books, like handing out free paperbacks in front of Toronto City Hall, but it’s fun to speculate.