BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
History books typically show Vancouver as a pioneer city built on forestry, fisheries, and tourism, but behind the snow-capped mountains and rain forests, the Vancouver of the first half of the 20th century was a seething mass of corruption. The top job at the Vancouver Police Department was a revolving door with the average tenure for a police chief of just four years.
In those early years, Detective Joe Ricci's beat was the opium dens and gambling joints of Chinatown, while LurancyHarris-the first female cop in Canada-patrolled the high-end brothels of Alexander Street. Later, proceeds from rum running produced some of the city's iconic buildings, cops became robbers, and the city reeled from a series of unsolved murders.
But Vancouver is more than bookies, brothels, and bootleggers-the city also produced legendary women, world-class entertainers and ground-breaking architecture.
Sensational Vancouver is a fully illustrated popular history book about Vancouver's famous and infamous, the ordinary and the extraordinary, filtered through the houses in which they lived.
Sensational Vancouver covers legendary women including Elsie MacGill, Phyllis Munday, Nellie Yip Quong and Joy Kogawa; high-end brothels, unsolved murders, and the homes and buildings of artists, architects and entertainers including Frederick Varley, Arthur Erickson, Bryan Adams, and Michael Bublé.
Includes a Walking Tour map of historic Strathcona and Chinatown.
Praise for At Home with History:
"You might call her the Sherlock Holmes of home history. Lazarus's stories bring Vancouver's past back to life." -the Outlook
"A mix of old black-and-white street-scene photos, jovial stories, and unique neighbourhood profiles, the book crushes the idea that Vancouver is a city without history." -The Georgia Straight
" exceptional incidents in ordinary houses and ordinary people in exceptional houses." -The Vancouver Sun
"Lazarus reveals the hidden stories of a number of Vancouver's heritage homes, setting each within the larger context of its neighbourhood bootleggers rub shoulders with financiers, prostitutes with police, murderers with mayors." -The Vancouver Courier
Eve Lazarus is an award-winning writer with an Aussie accent and a passion for history and heritage houses. She is the author of Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens, and her book At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver's Heritage Houses was a 2008 City of Vancouver book award finalist. Eve co-authored of The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman and LeRoy Jensen, and she wrote Frommer's with Kids Vancouver. Eve blogs obsessively about houses and their genealogies at http://evelazarus.com/blog/