Did you know that on Au­gust 26, 1962, the Trinidad Guardian News­pa­pers used 4,420 miles (7,113 kilo­me­tres) of newsprint to print 110,000 copies of a 120-page In­de­pen­dence Sup­ple­ment, which was dis­trib­uted with the Sun­day Guardian at no ex­tra cost to read­ers?

An ar­ti­cle print­ed in the Sun­day Guardian fur­ther stat­ed that this length of newsprint (4,420 miles), used in the pub­li­ca­tion of the 120-page spe­cial edi­tion, was enough to stretch from Trinidad to New York and back. In print­ing the sup­ple­ment, ap­prox­i­mate­ly 3,307 lbs (1,500 kilo­grammes) of ink was used.

The first In­de­pen­dence Sup­ple­ment con­tained 48 ar­ti­cles and a se­ries of pho­tographs that had nev­er been pub­lished be­fore, all re­lat­ing to im­por­tant facets of life in Trinidad and To­ba­go. It was al­so claimed that this his­toric Sun­day Guardian was the biggest ever in size and cir­cu­la­tion for any West In­di­an news­pa­per.

In the pho­to­graph, Mr Charles S Es­pinet, then ed­i­tor of the Sun­day Guardian, Trinidad Guardian and Evening News, is seen in the pres­ence of the man­ag­ing di­rec­tors and oth­er staff mem­bers of the Trinidad Pub­lish­ing Com­pa­ny Ltd, press­ing the but­ton to set in mo­tion the print­ing of the largest edi­tion of a news­pa­per in Trinidad and the West In­dies at the time.