Live! From Planet Salt Spring . . . it's Arthur Black, the voice you've longed to hear once more! In this first-time audio book format Black shares tales from that sphere on the outer limits he calls his home, Salt Spring Island, BC.

In this humorous collection of stories from across the water where the hitchhikers are a cut above average, Black off …

Parks and Nature Places Around Vancouver is a guide to the parks of Lower Mainland with special emphasis on natural history. Over forty naturalists with specializations in geology, ecology, botany, ornithology and marine life offer tips on spotting a sandhill crane, directions on where to explore amongst old-growth Douglas fir trees and beautiful w …

Spirit of the Nikkei Fleet is an intimate collection of stories of Japanese Canadians on the water, from the first Japanese immigrant's arrival in 1877 to the present day. The 130-year history of the Nikkei is full of drama, violence, epic struggles against injustice, failures and triumphs. Leaving Japan to escape a life of poverty, they arrived in …

Is there a more bizarre-looking animal in the sea than the octopus? A baggy, boneless body surmounted by a pair of soulless eyes and fleshy horns. Eight snake-like arms with hundreds of suction cups, a stubby funnel projecting like a left-over piece of fire hose... not to mention its three hearts and blue blood. The word cuddly doesn't spring to mi …

There are few more enjoyable ways to spend a relaxing afternoon than at the seashore collecting ornate seashells. But there is no need to fly away to some exotic tropical locale to begin the fun. If you are in the Pacific Northwest, you will find local beaches as rich in fascinating treasures as any place on earth--or at least you will once you hav …

At the north end of British Columbia's great inland sea, the Inside Passage divides amongst a scatter of islands whose breathtaking beauty makes them one of the Northwest's most popular cruising destinations. Unofficially known as the Discovery Islands (named after the main passage through them), Read, Cortes, Sonora, Maurelle, Hardwicke, Stuart, R …

Winner of the John Lyman Book Award for best Canadian naval and maritime history
Finalist for the Nereus Writers' Trust Non-fiction Award
Finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize, BC Book Prize
Longlisted for the 2007 Victoria Butler Book Prize
Honourable Mention for the Canadian Nautical Research Society's Keith Matthews Award

Fortune's …

Nominated for ForeWord Magazine's 2008 Book of the Year Award - Nature Category

In 1988, Chris Czajkowski walked into British Columbia's Central Coast Mountains to build a homestead, a business, and a life. A Mountain Year is a beautifully produced art book full of original paintings, sketches and diary entries, offering an awe-inspiring glimpse int …

Dig deep into to the history of some of Victoria's most interesting areas; The Ross Bay Villa, D'Arcy Island, Rodd Hill and the Royal Jubilee Hospital. Archeologists, anthropologists, historians and heritage researchers sift through the soil to unravel the mysteries below our feet, and to explore Victoria's unique cultural landscape. Ancient artifa …

At age seventeen, Jim Taylor began a career in writing as part-time high school sports reporter. Forty-eight years, some 7,500 five-a-week columns, three times as many radio shows and twelve books later, Jim Taylor is undeniably one of Canada's most loved sports writers. In Hello, Sweetheart? Gimmie Rewrite!, Taylor looks back at half a century of …

Vancouver Island offers the finest salmon fishing found anywhere in the world. Some destinations are easily accessible, while others are in remote wilderness settings. This informative book reveals where they are, when to go, and how to fish once you arrive.

In writing this book, experienced saltwater anglers Larry Stefanyk and Robert Jones tapped t …

With its island-studded Inside Passage, towering fjords, open-ocean beaches, quaint villages and sparkling cities, the BC coast is known as one of the world's great maritime cruising destinations. What many travellers may not realize is that you don't need to own a yacht or go on a cruise ship to explore it. This indispensable book shows how you ca …

In 1992, Chuck Cadman was regarded by his Surrey neighbours as a typical suburban couch potato, a man who, despite the ponytail left over from his days as a small-time rock musician, had settled into a nine-to-five job and seemed content to pay down the mortgage, watch TV, drink a few beers and enjoy family life. Then, on October 17, his sixteen-ye …

Finalist for the 2008 BC Booksellers' Choice Award, BC Book Prizes

Mike McCardell is known to thousands of British Columbians as the tousled gent who delivers heart-warming stories at the close of Global TV's six o'clock News Hour. In the three decades McCardell has been a reporter with Global BC, he has discovered that everyone has a story to tell, …

"Put aside the fact that it ended my playing career, punched holes in my memory and put life as I knew it on indefinite hold, it wasn't that tough a hit."

Thus begins Goin' Deep, Matt Dunigan's gritty, often startling memoir of his 14-year journey as a Canadian Football League quarterback, a career brought to a shattering halt on an afternoon in Ham …

Winner of Foreword Magazine's Best Nature Non-Fiction Award.

In 1964 when the Vancouver Aquarium obtained its first killer whale, Moby Doll, the prevalent attitudes towards killer whales was that they were fierce and vicious man-eaters. Over the years, attitudes have begun to change, and orcas are now revered as loveable, intelligent creatures and i …

Doreen Armitage, author of the bestselling From the Wheelhouse: Tugboaters Tell their own Stories, is back with a fresh collection of salty tales from a varied collection of men who earn their living in, on or beside the sea. A former DFO skipper tells a heartrending story of trying to rescue the crew of a fish boat foundering off the west coast of …

British Columbia's Jedediah Island is now a popular marine park, 640 acres of natural splendour tucked in between Texada and Lasqueti islands in the Strait of Georgia. But when Mary Palmer and her husband purchased the island half a century ago, they found out it could be challenging indeed to live in an isolated coastal paradise.

Jedediah Days is a …

Finalist for the 2008 BC Booksellers' Choice Award, BC Book Prizes

Mike McCardell is known to thousands of British Columbians as the tousled gent who delivers heart-warming stories at the close of Global TV's six o'clock News Hour. In the three decades McCardell has been a reporter with Global BC, he has discovered that everyone has a story to tell, …

Longlisted for the 2007 Victoria Butler Book Prize

Arthur Black--bestselling author, three-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, beloved radio personality, and newspaper columnist-- proves in his latest sidesplitting collection of tales, Black to the Grindstone, that, without a doubt, you not only get better but funnier with age.

Demon …

Whales and Dolphins of the North American Pacific is the most comprehensive photographic guide to the marine mammals of the North American Pacific (Baja California, Mexico to South East Alaska), covering all 38 species of cetacean (whales, dolphins and porpoises), six species of seals and sea lions, and the sea otter.

Whales and Dolphins of the Nort …

Beautiful Desolation Sound, 150 km north of Vancouver, has for many years been the most popular cruising destination on the BC coast, but is today almost as devoid of local occupants as it was in 1792 when the dyspeptic Captain George Vancouver gave it its misleading name. It has not always been this way. Thick clamshell middens in remote bays, rot …

Halibut fishing is steadily growing in popularity yet, until now, few books have been available on the subject. Expert anglers Robert H. Jones and Larry E. Stefanyk tell readers everything they need to know to land the big one and get the most from fishing the west coast of British Columbia in Island Halibut Fisherman.

The authors are experienced in …

Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Award for Poetry

High Speed Through Shoaling Water incorporates the beauty of the rural landscape with the strangeness of living in today's world. These deceptively simple poems cover rural life, social issues, love's vicissitudes, aging and the writing life. Throughout the book,
Wayman interweaves reflections on the la …

Rivtow was just a three-boat log-towing operation when Lucille Johnstone came aboard as an unskilled girl Friday in the late 1940s. By the 1980s, Rivtow had taken over its biggest rival to become one of the giants of the marine transportation industry with connections worldwide, and Lucille was the driving force behind its success. As the company g …

Mining is BC's second largest industry but you'd never know it to visit any BC bookstore. Books on logging, fishing, and tourism are there in abundance, but the subject of mining is practically untouched. As Tom Henry proves beyond a doubt in this lively volume, it is not for any lack of wonderful stories about the men and women who have been bitte …

Towboats have been a part of British Columbia's history since 1836, when the Hudson's Bay Company's ungainly sidewheeler S.S. Beaver made the first powered tow up the coast. Over the years, tugs and their crews have towed just about everything, including food, machinery, rocks, paper, oil, salt, lumber, oil rigs, deep-sea ships, cars and houses. Th …

This latest book from Chris Czajkowski's spectacular corner of the world is another engrossing account of life in her wilderness. She regales the reader with stories of shimmering mountain peaks, roaring snow-fed creeks, bears, eagles and monstrous storms; and tales of her dogs--Bucky (short for Buckethead), who chases everything; Max, who tussles …

In 1897, a 21-year-old unemployed Californian named Jack London borrowed funds so he could make his fortune in the Klondike. His life prior to the gold rush had been a story of toil and lean days. He knew how to pitch a tent, start a fire with minimal effort and how to go without either a fire or a blanket if circumstances required. He had lived in …

Stanley Park is the third largest urban park in North America, with over eight million people passing through it each year. And for good reason--it's a spectacular oasis of nature just steps from the busy downtown streets and sidewalks of Vancouver, BC. Visitors can enjoy majestic cedar and fir trees and wild native plants as well as scenic beaches …

In this masterful work by award-winning poet David Zieroth, a man opens his apartment door to find a younger version of himself. The boy becomes his guide on a profound journey from 21st-century urban Vancouver to the 1950s Canadian prairies and back again. Along the way, time slides magically back and forth between the speaker's contemporary exist …

Finalist for 2006 BC Booksellers' Choice Award In Honour Of Bill Duthie

With 1,700 superb colour photographs of over 1,400 species, Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest: A Photographic Encyclopedia of Invertebrates, Seaweeds and Selected Fishes is the most comprehensive collection of photographs of Pacific Northwest marine life ever published. It i …

In the late 1980s, Chris Czajkowski left her truck at the end of a logging road 300 kilometres north of Vancouver and hiked for two days on unmarked wilderness trails to the site of what would become her home. This is her account of building three log cabins, an eco-tourism business and a life beside an unnamed lake 5,000 feet high in the Coast Ran …

No aspect of this harrowing journey was more difficult--or deadly--than the trek over the Chilkoot Trail: a fifty-three kilometre journey over the coastal mountains from the tidewaters of Alaska, through British Columbia to the headwaters of the Yukon River. But even before the gold rush, the trail was an important First Nations trade and travel ro …

In 1907, Laura Beatrice Berton, a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher, left her comfortable life in Toronto Ontario to teach in a Yukon mining town. She fell in love with the North--and with a northerner--and made Dawson City her home for the next 25 years. I Married the Klondike is her classic and enduring memoir.

When she first arrived by steamboat …

Several years ago, Paula Wild spent a month in the Bella Coola Valley. Afterward, she couldn't get the place out of her mind, and it ended up hugely impacting her life. She spent the next few years travelling back and forth between the comparatively bustling metropolis of her hometown of Courtenay, British Columbia and the rugged wilds of Bella Co …

On the West Coast, few subjects are as controversial as salmon farming. Every week, new studies raise alarming questions about the safety of farmed fish and the risk farms pose to the environment. But federal, provincial and state governments continue to support expansion of fish farms all along the coast. People are justifiably confused. Just what …

But readers of Mountie in Mukluks will soon realize they are in the presence of one of the most un-cop-like cops who ever built an igloo. And by the time they have finished they will never be able to think quite the same way about the fabled Redcoats, or life in the far north.
During the 1930s, Bill White gave up trapping and joined the Royal Cana …

In this fascinating and funny collection of correspondence, Canada's greatest poet lets it all hang out in spirited private exchanges with Pierre Trudeau, Carol Shields, Earle Birney, Anna Porter, Charles Bukowski, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Jack McClelland, Northrup Frye, William Golding, Darryl Sittle …

For much of the legendary BC politician-cum-hotliner's career, calling him a socialist would have risked a scorching riposte if not a punch in the nose, but in his latest book that is the label he gives himself. Has the old warrior gone over to the other side? Well, not exactly. Rafe Mair has dominated the British Columbia airwaves for years, pulli …

Dahlia Cassidy was so angry with herself that if she weren't busy driving her '57 Chev back from Tofino, she'd have used both feet to boot herself in the arse. She figured she was just about ready to swear off sex altogether, probably forever. She had let herself get talked into leaving her kids with a babysitter and spending a wild weekend at Long …

This unforgettable story reveals how medical missionaries responded to crises, emergencies and sudden illnesses--including grizzly bear attacks and airplane crashes--without modern technology or urban hospitals. It portrays the small missions and infirmaries and tells how their staff handled life and death in the deep bush, on mountain ranges, in N …

Like a well-delivered punch line, Black & White And Read All Over, the tenth book by award-winning writer Arthur Black, is guaranteed to make you laugh. The beloved radio personality and newspaper columnist tackles a range of subjects from Sasquatch hunters to nose jobs to the legalization of pot. Known for his delight in the bizarre and derision o …

British Columbia is known for the colourful pioneers who helped build and shape the character of this weird but wonderful province. And few were as colourful as Portuguese Joe Silvey - a saloon keeper, whaler and pioneer of seine fishing in British Columbia.

Born on Pico Island, of Portugal's Azores Islands, sometime between 1830 and 1840, Joseph Si …

Go Leaving Strange - the latest collection from award-winning poet Patrick Lane - is filled with poems that explore the darker side of human consciousness and desire. A man kills his own six-year-old child in "Weeds." An addict strives to keep ahead of death in "Smack." But amid this bleak landscape of pity and regret, there is also redemption and …

The author of Black Tie and Tales and Black in the Saddle Again, both winners of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, returns with a new collection guaranteed to tickle your funny bone and make you scratch your head at the absurdities of life in the early years of the new millennium. In slyly ironic, pointedly witty essays, Black takes aim at the …

* What Ontario city hosted a Wild West show 11 years before Buffalo Bill Cody got his start?
* Where in Ontario does the world's longest street end?
* What Ontarian was the last man to win an Olympic gold medal in golf?
* What native of Cobourg won a Best Actress Oscar?

These and many more fascinating factoids about Canada's most populous province a …

A richly illustrated chronicle that captures more than a century of life on a landmark Fraser Valley farm. This fascinating account details farming methods of a bygone era and all the toil, triumph and tragedy behind the establishment of a championship dairy herd.

When Allen Casey Wells passed through the valley of the Chilliwack River en route to t …

Skookum Sal comes from a long line of log birlers. Her brother, Skookum Sam, is a log birler. Her daddy is a log birler, as was his daddy and his daddy before him. So it's only fitting that when Sal turned 11 years old she thought she would become a log birler too.

First Sal has to convince her daddy to teach her how to be log birler--because Sal is …