Ex-logger and gas station owner Frank White says living to the age of one hundred is not all it's cracked up to be but it has some plusses. When he trundles down to the local shopping centre in Pender Harbour pretty girls hug him and everybody in town seems to be glad he's lived another day. But celebrity has its drawbacks--when he was only fifty a …

Dal Richards and author Jim Taylor recount the life story of the legendary bandleader in One More Time: The Dal Richards Story. These are Dal's memories of the stars and the wannabes, the hustlers and bootleggers and hat-check chicks, all of whom paraded through his life in the days when Vancouver's nightclub scene rivaled San Francisco's and Holly …

In its heyday in the 1950s and '60s, the remote community of Elsa, 300 miles north of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, was the epicentre of one of the world's most lucrative silver mining operations--an enterprise that far surpassed the riches produced during the iconic Klondike gold rush. For twelve of those years, Gerald Priest was the chief as …

Bestselling author and TV personality Mike McCardell, known for his humorous and touching portraits of ordinary BC lives, turns a new page and crafts a bittersweet memoir of his own hardscrabble childhood in New York City.

Written with all the warmth and ironic humour his fans have come to know and love, Cardboard Ocean is an affectionate evocation …

Tell me, how do I write better poetry? You can't? I'm not surprised. You can write it yourself but damned if you can tell someone else how, your classes to the contrary.
—Al Purdy

The truth is none of us who write poetry should allow ourselves to make public critiques of the others, not in a small country like this where we know each other too we …

Cloudwalker, describing the creation of the rivers, is the second in a series of Northwest Coast legends by Roy Henry Vickers and Robert Budd. Their previous collaboration, Raven Brings the Light (2013), is a national bestseller.

On British Columbia's northwest coast lies the Sacred Headwaters--the source of three of British Columbia's largest salmo …

Retired fishery officer Randy Nelson's first love was catching poachers. That obsession, plus a devious mind and enthusiasm for marathon running, spelled big trouble for law-breaking fishermen. Thirty-five years in the field (and stream) netted a gold mine of stories: with hair-raising tales of grizzly bear attacks; angry axe-wielding, rock-throwin …

Writer, environmentalist and gardener Des Kennedy has gathered together his best, most outrageous and most contemplative articles and essays of the past decade into a book full of playful wit and insight.

Kennedy recounts one newspaper's April Fool's Day prank that had men across the UK buying heather in order to propagate a poor-man's Viagra, expan …

For over three decades editorial cartoonist and BC resident Adrian Raeside has trained his laser wit on a subject he knows well--the foibles of life on Canada's wet coast. From yoga devotees to redneck fishermen, political potheads to bloated bureaucrats, plus provincial pet peeves like leaky condos,ICBC premiums and smart meters, no stone is left …

Frank White started writing the story of his life as a pioneer BC truck driver in 1974 when he was only sixty. His boisterous yarn in Raincoast Chronicles about wrangling tiny trucks overloaded with huge logs down steep mountains with no brakes won the Canadian Media Club award for Best Magazine Feature and was reprinted so many times everyone urge …

What if Mike McCardell--beloved reporter of glasses half-full and the brighter side of life--is actually dead... or, more specifically, un-dead? Suppose he has continued to walk among the living ever since he was a sapper with the famous detachment of Royal Engineers who came to British Columbia in 1859 and was known as Jock Linn--the namesake for …

Whether readers are interested in logging history, a good yarn or folk art, they will be enthralled by Now You're Logging, British Columbia's first graphic novel and a enduring West Coast classic, published in celebration of what would have been Bus Griffiths' 100th birthday.

Now You're Logging is the story of Al and Red, who go to work in a small W …

Here, at last, is a book about commercial salmon fishing, by well-known fisherman and industry analyst Dr. Don Pepper--one that is sure to become a West Coast classic. Pepper fished salmon as a crewman every season from 1953 to 1969. After a hiatus in the '70s, he returned to fishing in the '80s, balancing his life at sea with a career as a profess …

The crows pick at the waste on the asphalt.
The men push jingling shopping carts. Or stand and mimic life
in a prison yard. The wild white swan is dead. Where I caught
trout as a child, no trout swim now. The drives
and crescents gouge ravines, make creeks disappear. Where wild
baby fish run, they run the gauntlet of penned fish. They are eaten al …

This tale of a young man's first summer as a commercial salmon fisherman on the BC coast, written in 1948 by the renowned fisherman and outdoor adventure writer Roderick Haig-Brown, has become a modern classic.

Don Morgan has made enough money trapping on northern Vancouver Island to realize his dream: he has bought himself a 32-foot West Coast salm …

Clarke had no interest in "trophy climbs" and never did ascend many of BC's highest peaks. On the other hand, he explored more virgin territory and racked up more first ascents than any other climber--perhaps more than any climber who ever lived.

Although he came to be honoured far and wide and is one of the few mountaineers to be awarded the Order …

History in BC grows profusely and luxuriantly, but with odd undergrowth," observed historian J.M.S. Careless many years ago. This claim is fully borne out by this impressive anthology of some of the province's most distinguished historians, geographers, and writers gleaned from over forty years of British Columbia's leading scholarly journal, BC St …

Seymour lies between the City of North Vancouver and Indian Arm and includes the communities of Dollarton, Deep Cove, the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation and the popular Mount Seymour winter sports complex. Compiled with the help of knowledgeable Seymour seniors of the Deep Cove Heritage Society, Echoes Across Seymour provides unparalleled insight into …

Salt Spring, Pender, Galiano, Mayne and Saturna are the best known of the Southern Gulf Islands. Their residents value a rich food and drink heritage, and experiment busily with new foods and approaches to improve diversity and flavour, and support special diets and local sustainability. They celebrate slow foods--and slow islands; and many embrace …

Bestselling author Chris Czajkowski returns with more revelations of life in the far reaches of the Chilcotin.

After nearly three decades of wilderness dwelling far from neighbours and roads, with the nearest community accessible only via float plane or days of hiking, Czajkowski purchases a derelict homestead with rough road access at Ginty Creek, …

For more than a decade, the Globe and Mail has featured comprehensive obituaries of notable British Columbians by columnist Tom Hawthorn. He recounts the lives of the recently departed in an engaging style, finding anecdotes to illuminate personality, giving voice to those who no longer have one. These stories are not about death, but about life in …

Christine Allen and Michael Kluckner's portrayal of life on Killara Farm moves thoughtfully through a year of gardening with a rich, detailed narrative that evokes the many pleasures of life in rural Southwestern BC.

Allen, a master gardener, is also a lyrical writer, expressing the tiny details of life on the farm--the "winter jasmine, doggedly flo …

Publishing sensation and popular Global TV personality Mike McCardell returns with a new collection of hilarious, heartwarming and honest stories. These are stories of the defender of a handicapped parking spot, a woman who has delivered homemade Valentine cards to neighbours for twenty years, and love between a widower and a woman who had never be …

Diana Phillips, daughter of Canadian folk legend Pan Phillips, shares more extraordinary tales about her life on the ranch in the remote British Columbian backcountry.

Two years after publishing Beyond the Chilcotin, her remarkable memoir about growing up on her famous father's pioneer ranch in the Chilcotin, Diana Phillips continues her story. Dis …

From Captain George Vancouver to Muriel "Curve of Time" Blanchet to Jim "Spilsbury's Coast" Spilsbury, visitors to Desolation Sound have left behind a trail of books endowing the area with a romantic aura that helps to make it British Columbia's most popular marine park. In this hilarious and captivating book, CBC personality Grant Lawrence adds a …

Tom Wayman's newest collection of poems, Dirty Snow, unflinchingly considers the impact of the Afghan War: its absence and presence in Canadians' everyday lives as citizens of a nation at war.

The collection explores Wayman's view that Canada's military intervention in a civil war between two odious sets of combatants has degraded Canadians' quality …

British Columbia's Sunshine Coast is a sublimely scenic 160-kilometre stretch of waterfront between Howe Sound and Desolation Sound, reached by a 40-minute ferry ride from West Vancouver. Join Howard White, award-winning humorist and lifelong coast denizen, on a guided tour from Gibsons, where the long-running TV series The Beachcombers was filmed, …

Northwest Coast peoples were maritime engineers who mastered the art of building dugout canoes from gigantic red cedars, using only tools made from bone, stone, and wood. Ubiquitous, these elegant craft were used for everyday and ceremonial purposes, for fishing, hunting and trading, for feasting and potlatching, and in warfare—they were the keys …

Bill White (1905–2001) was an itinerant ranch hand and trapper, a member of the RCMP and an Arctic traveller, but he was best known for his work as the head of the Vancouver Labour Council and president of the Marine Workers and Boilermakers Union, the largest local union in Canada in his time. It was a position he held for eleven straight years …

An ultra-fan whose home is a shrine to the Vancouver Canucks thinks he may have the answer to the team's shocking collapse in the 2011 playoffs; a homeless man who has become a caring mainstay at the Downtown Eastside shelter run by the First United Church, and many anecdotes of generosity among people who have nothing are only a few of the inspira …

Question: How much in love with a sport does a boy have to be when, at age 14, he asks his parents for permission to leave home and move to England on his own so he can join Reading FC to try to become a soccer professional—and warns that if they say no he will never forgive them? Answer: As much in love as the scared-stiff Bobby Lenarduzzi was w …

The Yukon is a mythic place: the land is vast and wild, the climate harsh and uncompromising, the people resourceful and resilient. Say the word "Yukon" and southerners still conjure up images of the rough and ready frontier: whiskered men in plaid shirts or parka-clad women wielding axes in the struggle for survival in a silent, isolated land. The …

Former RCMP Sergeant Charlie Scheideman, author of Policing the Fringe: The Curious Life of a Small-Town Mountie, is back with the same wry humour and a new collection of incredible stories drawn from his twenty-seven years of patrolling the small communities of the interior of British Columbia.

These new adventures have him re-polishing his boots …

A witty, brightly-written memoir of childhood in the Yukon, The Cinnamon Mine traces the adventures of the Porsild family from Denmark to Greenland, through Arctic Canada, and finally to remote Johnson's Crossing , where they operated one of the first tourist lodges on the Alaska Highway.

Author Ellen Davignon recalls the early years when three kids …

Sea stars are amongst the most common and conspicuous invertebrates that thrive in the rich waters of the Pacific Northwest, from northern California to southeast Alaska. Worldwide there are more than 2,000 different species, but no other temperate region has a greater variety and abundance of these colourful and often very large echinoderms, which …

Newly revised and updated in 2010 with additional photographs and up-to-date names, this full-colour field guide to the marine life of coastal British Columbia, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and northern California is perfect for divers, boaters and beachcombers. It is a ready reference to more than 400 of the most common species, the fascinating loca …

Rumble Seat is an evocative, poetically-written memoir of artist Helen Piddington's childhood in the Victoria suburb of Esquimalt--and what a childhood it was! The Piddingtons arrived from Quebec in 1924, and settled into a life that in many ways typified well-off Victoria families of the period. Helen's father, Major Arthur Grosvenor Piddington, w …

In 2008 Keith Billington's surprise bestseller, House Calls by Dogsled: Six Years in an Arctic Medical Outpost, vividly described Billington and his wife Muriel's experiences providing medical care to a string of isolated First Nations settlements in the Northwest
Territories during the 1960s. In Cold Land, Warm Hearts: More Memories of an Arctic …

Fishing with Gubby is the marvelously illustrated, authentic account of one season in the life of a salmon fisherman. Based on actual events, the story is told by award-winning children's illustrator Kim La Fave and former fisherman Gary Kent. Together they make the wharfs, boats, fishermen and villages of the BC coast come alive with remarkable de …

Mike McCardell is an institution in BC television with his anti-news stories of oddball inspiration that close the News Hour on Global BC. Lately he has become a publishing institution as well with his series of heartwarming books full of stories about the ways in which ordinary people cope with extraordinary challenges. Fresh
from 2009's bestsell …

"Bring me moose meat! You will not be sorry!" So says Whitehorse author and cook Michele Genest to the hunters in her circle. Wild is wonderful when it comes to Genest's creative treatments for northern viands, with exciting ideas such as moose cooked in Yukon-brewed espresso stout and finished with chocolate, lime and cilantro, Arctic char marinat …

Quadra Island, the largest and most populated of the Discovery Islands at the top end of Georgia Strait, has a history loaded with adventure. From the We Wai Kai warriors of the 19th century to the loggers, gold miners, prostitutes and ranchers who followed, its people have provided the stuff of legend. Taylor draws us into the story of her island …

Sometimes called the most colourful creatures on earth,
nudibranchs are a type of shell-less marine snail that capture the attention of scuba divers, snorkelers and tidepool-gazers with their bizarre, ornate body forms and incandescent colouration.

There are over 3,000 species worldwide and some of the most spectacular specimens are native to the te …

It is generally known that the West Coast's once-great commercial fishing industry has fallen on hard times, but as Alan Haig-Brown demonstrates in this new book, reports of its demise are exaggerated. A veteran of the industry himself, Haig-Brown here offers a "state of the industry" report, discovering pockets of surprising activity among the vi …

Conspiracies to overthrow the Yukon; terrorism in the Klondike;a bigamist Klondike Casanova; gunfights and how the Mounties got their man; Robert Service's secret love life; the Canadian who fooled Alaskans into making him governor; floods, famine and things found frozen from the past. The Yukon has them all--and more!

History Hunting in the Yukon r …

To say that Tony Parsons is a household name and that his is one of the most recognizable faces in BC are almost understatements. Having served over 35 years as anchor of the News Hour, the province's most popular television news program, Parsons is a virtual member of millions of BC families. Many British Columbians really don't believe a thing un …

For several weeks in February, the eyes of the world will be on Whistler, BC, as it hosts the 2010 Olympic Winter Games and the appetite for a story to go with the place will be extreme. Stephen Vogler has that story, and in this book he tells it fully for the first time.

Vogler is one of those rare Whistlerites who actually grew up in Whistler and …

Mike McCardell's bestselling books about finding rays of pure sunshine among the dark byways of the big city have a full measure of heartwarming tales but this time he declares, "I have found the answer to enjoying an incredible life, no matter who you are or where you are or what you are doing or how much you weigh."

In his 2008 book, Getting to th …