The Perfect Weekend Read

by Amanda on Mar 1st, 2007

Never mind a month of Sundays – in 2006, the Sunday Times celebrated 100 years as South Africa’s most successful newspaper.

This book comprises a collection of articles and photographs that have appeared in its pages over those hundred years, and follows the stunning success of four commemorative supplements published in the newspaper. It is a record of how the newspaper covered events big and small since its first edition on 4 February 1906. As such it makes the perfect weekend read – we daresay as satisfying as the paper itself!

A Century of Sundays is a chronicle of the attitudes and prejudices exactly as they appeared in the paper of the time. While it celebrates excellent journalism, it also reveals where the paper got things wrong, such as the editorial in 1948 which confidently predicted that DF Malan’s bizarre social experiment called apartheid would not last beyond that year.

The book does not only track political events, but also fashion, culture, entertainment, sport, technology and many other developments in South Africa and the world over the past century.

It is beautifully designed and fully illustrated, drawing from a massive wealth of photographs and cartoons. It reproduces some of the actual pages that broke important news stories. Buy it – and hold a veritable treasure trove of images and ideas from the past hundred years.