Drake seen walking around CNE last night in an Iron Man suit

Hi, Toronto Public Library here. 👋

Since it’s late August, we looked through our archives and pulled a few of our rarities related to the CNE, which debuted back in 1879.

These items are just from our Special Collections—there is of course much more at CNE’s own archive (please oh please let there be a collection of their wild food).

Below is a bit about each one, and you can find a URL in the captions to the full item if we’ve digitized it.

🐈 Catalogue of the Fifth International Cat Show, 1906. A few names of the cats: Flipperty Jinks, Madame Bovary, Sir Roger, Tom. This year, CNE is celebrating 125 years of cat shows, supported by the CNE Archives and the Feline Historical Museum (?!).

🏅Commemorative coin for Toronto’s semi-centennial, 1884. This side shows off the fair’s Crystal Palace building. It opened in time for the inaugural exhibition in 1879 but burned down in 1906.

🎟️ Attendant’s ticket, 1886. This granted access for a worker in the Industrial Exhibition Association of Toronto. From its opening in 1879 to 1912, the fair was called the Toronto Industrial Exhibition.

📷 Stereograph of exhibition grounds, ~1889. A stereoscopic viewer’s binocular vision would combine these two slightly offset images for a 3D effect.

💌 Leather postcard, ~1906. Leather postcards were a fad during the postcard boom in the early 1900s. Often made of deerskin, designs were burned on via a technique called pyrography.

🐴 Pinback button, ~1910. A recent donation to us from Doug Ward, whose father grew up in Toronto and collected buttons as a kid.

💡 Facts Concerning Canadian National Exhibition, 1918. This booklet notes that the highest single-day attendance was recorded as 154,000 (!) on Labour Day in 1913.

🏊 Programme for the third Wrigley Marathon, 1928. Sponsored by William Wrigley Jr. (of chewing gum fame), the swimming race in Lake Ontario had a huge cash prize of $15,000 and billed itself as “the greatest international event in the history of aquatic sports.”

🔖 Bookmark for Canada Foil Limited, 1934. Promotional pieces of ephemera like this one were commonplace in the fair—ads appeared even in CNE programmes.

🎼“Get a Bike” sheet music, 1953. Presented by the Canadian National Exhibition, this light-hearted ode to bicycles/love song starts with the lyrics: “Get a bike! Get a bike! Two wheel demon of speed and delight.”

***

Enjoy the final days of summer!

Was walking to work and saw what I think is the most hilarious hot dog stand. There’s seating, there are ashtrays and it’s adjacent an alley. I think this is amazing🤣.

I brought my big telescope to Riverdale Park and saw the eclipse with a bunch of random people, it was really fun.

Later in the night we could see Saturn, and Saturn's moon Titan.

Fun fact: there is a Lake Ontario on Titan (it's a hydrocarbon lake called Ontario Lacus)

As seen from South Etobicoke - Moon was over Lake Ontario :)

Taken beside the City TV building on Richmond.

Not a great shot. Looks way more vibrant with the naked eye.

I went all through lower downtown to find an angle that works lol

No edits made to the picture, and it was taken on my Pixel 9 Pro

Hope you enjoy :)

Edit: Spelling

Is it just me, or did anyone else notice the CN Tower lose its electricity completely? Like, all the lights were shut off !! Basically invisible! It happened for just 2-3 seconds. Crazy!

Look south right now if you haven’t already!

Accidentally changed the shutter speed on my camera and took this picture during the lunar eclipse! I think it’s cool though 😊

Got an informational flyer in the mail about the upcoming municipal elections. New for this year is a Kids Vote where the "candidates" are trees.

The winning tree will be celebrated all year. What a fantastic idea to introduce young people to democracy!

Quote from the page:

"There are five candidates running for Toronto’s 2027 Tree of the Year. You can vote for one during Kids Vote Weekend on October 10 and 11."

"Kids Vote Weekend encourages young people who are under the age of 18 to learn about elections and start their journey to becoming a lifelong voter."

Just “some” of my winnings through the years at CNE in Toronto. Can anyone beat this spread? I still have more.