"During his years as captain of the Canadian government steapship Quadra, John T. Walbran became fascinated with the BC coast and set to work on his classic British Columbia Coast Names, which was published in 1909. Reprinted here in facsimile edition, this book is an essential item in any library of Northwest history."

The People's Land is an expression of a particular moment in norhtern history -- the darkness, even, that preceded the light.

For some years, Hugh Brody lived and studied among the Inuit, the people fo the Arctic. His book, The People's Land, describes their recent past with sympathy and indignation. He tells how the Whites came as fur traders and …

Robert Zend's eleventh book continues his wonderfully surreal explorations of the mind trapped in the paradoxes of time and space. This posthumous edition includes a Foreword by John Robert Colombo and an Afterword by Northrop Frye.

The year is 1860. A priest, sent on a mission to an Indian village on the coast of British Columbia, believes he is successfully converting the people to Christianity. He is unaware of the anger, selfishness, and love that dictate their actions, and that lead to fatal consequences.

With multiple viewpoints and haunting images, Pauline Holdstock recr …

The Brooklyn Museum has played a major role in presenting and interpreting North American Native art. Its commitment to this field began in 1903, when R. Stewart Culin was appointed to head its new Department of Ethnology. During three trips to the Northwest in 1905, 1908, and 1911, Culin collaborated with Dr. Charles F. Newcombe and bought several …

This book of prose poems strips down the codes and conventions that make up our society’s “popular narratives.” A revealing and witty, exploded view of our culture.

From 1942 to 1949, a group of innocent Canadians were uprooted from their homes and businesses on the west coast, dispossessed, and forced to disperse across Canada, merely on the basis of their Japanese ancestry. Some 4,000 were even exiled to wartorn Japan.
These injustices remained unresolved for nearly forty years. Then in the 1970s, a handful …

Known for his pioneering work in Chinese historical phonetics, Edwin Pulleyblank has compiled this Lexicon to present in convenient dictionary form the result of his researches on the phonology of Middle Chinese and its evolution to Mandarin.

The Lexicon complements Pulleyblank's earlier book, Middle Chinese, by providing reconstructed pronunciation …

Canada has always been something other than what it might seem to be. This collection is a contribution to the official discussion of who we are.
I don't even know what street Canada is on.
-Al Capone

Why did Canada abandon four decades of peace to join the United States in the Persian Gulf War? The author of this provocative book argues that Canada's status as a nuclear colony of the US military paves the way for Canadian participation in American military adventures abroad. One nuclear outpost is Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island, where the US N …

Beautifully illustrated by BC folk hero Bus Griffiths who wrote and illustrated the popular comic book Now You're Logging, Patrick and the Backhoe is a classic story of decency and guts triumphing over arrogance and greed.

Patrick lives in a little town on the side of a high mountain. Patrick's mother and father own the town bookstore, and his broth …

The Hour's Acropolis, John Pass's tenth book of poetry, is a classical meditation rebounding between domesticity and myth. Ben Johnson's Olympic disgrace is counterpoint to poetry's inspirational lightning, Steve Fonyo appears next to Odysseus, Orpheus listens to Lou Reed.

Stylistically, this book is a complex and ingenious construct, a poetic acrop …

Here is the latest issue of an enduring legend on the BC coast, packed as usual with articles, stories, tall tales, photographs and drawings by people who know and love the raincoast. From bush pilots and lightkeepers to logging and fishing, the subjects in this anthology are fascinating history and plain good reading. Contributors include Howard W …

In savage blizzards, blinding whiteouts and 60-below-zero temperatures, steel axles snap like twigs; brakes and steering wheels seize up; bare hands freeze when they touch metal. The lake ice cracks and sometimes gives way, so the roadbuilders drive with one hand on the door, ready to jump.

John Denison and his crew waited for the coldest, darkest d …

From BC's colonial days through 1950, the BC Provincial Police were the province's main law enforcers and, in many places, the only ones. It was up to them to catch and prosecute thieves, gold-rush swindlers, brawlers, bootleggers and murderers throughout BC's vast wilderness, and constables also acted as tax collectors, coroners, census takers, pa …

If you have food allergies or food sensitivities, this book was written for you. The All Natural Allergy Cookbook offers a wealth of information valuable to people with food allergies and to those interested in improving their diets by cutting down on eggs, meat or dairy. The book begins with some basic cooking tips to facilitate success in the kit …

Edith Iglauer has been a journalist for four decades, working for The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. This book is a lively retrospective of her writings, from the 1940s when she covered Eleanor Roosevelt's press conferences, through the 1960s when she was present at the founding of Canada's first Inuit co-operati …

Fisherman's Winter is another book in Roderick Haig-Brown's famed "seasons" cycle, this time taking the author far from the trout streams of his beloved British Columbia to the new angling realm of South America. Here he fishes the Tolten and Laja rivers of Chile, Argentina's Manso and Traful, always with the keen eye and open heart of the superb w …

This book concentrates on twenty-three sightings in Alberta and British Columbia. Was it merely an Indian legend told to early explorers, a story characteristic of the native's mythical culture? Or, were the stories of giant hairy man-like apes actual reports of an animal that has managed to mystify its researchers and elude western civilization fo …

Canada’s first poet laureate George Bowering is one of the best known writers and literary personalities in the nation. Poet, novelist, essayist, historian, critic and teacher, he is a prolific, irrepressible writer whose works have been published and produced in an extraordinary variety of forms. A Record of Writing traces the development of Bo …

As history is overcome by progress, Jens Skolleborg captures the essence of the past in this small volume of exquisite pen-and-ink drawings. These detailed sketches are rigidly accurate yet flowing and warm in feel and texture.The artist has researched each historic building to absorb the authentic character of the time and that chameleon like graf …

In a land such as the Yukon, with its colorful past matched by its colorful characters, tales abound of the perils and adventures experienced by those hardy sourdoughs who first pioneered the country. Many are the tales that have been told in the still of the un-equalled splendor of a Yukon evenings while gathered around the campfire with close com …

Seasoned tale-spinner Arthur Mayse has combined a vivid setting with an involving and suspenseful plot, and the result is a classic juvenile book and a memorable west coast story. Fourteen-year-old Paddy sets out to make the money handlining off the coast of British Columbia, and finds it a more daunting prospect than he thought. Setting up camp on …

As we enter the 1990s, we mark the 100th anniversary of the decade which saw the establishment of a white settlement at Sechelt, British Columbia. The first of those settlers, Thomas John Cook, was the grandfather of Helen Dawe, who established for herself a reputation as the foremost chronicler of Sechelt history. Helen Dawe's Sechelt brings toget …

"MY WIFE HAS GONE CRAZY - one of the isolated upcoast lightkeepers in this astonishing book writes to his Victoria supervisor. "PLEASE SEND SOMEONE UP HERE AT ONCE."
It could be an incident from any one of many poignant stories which unfold as Don Graham, himself keeper of Vancouver's famous Point Atkinson Light, breaks the lighthouse fraternity's …

"... perfect. Marion Johnson has created a whimsical and provocative fictional mosaic ... a compassionately wicked satire."
--The Globe and Mail

"I recommend this book to you. It is a book of poetry whose authorship is plural, but I hesitate to call it an anthology because of certain conventions which the mention of the term causes the reader to expect. This is a book whose mythic spectrum is broad. Very. I took on the project as editor because the body of work presented me by publisher and …

The Kitwancool people live in a village of the same name on a tributary of the Skeena River, near Hazelton. In his introduction, Wilson Duff says, "the Kitwancool think of themselves as an independent and completely autonomous tribe." This book, written by the Kitwancool, contains statements about their history, territories, laws and customs. It is …

This book is drawn from Haida Monumental Art, the most important work yet published on Haida culture. Chiefs of the Sea and Sky presents an overview of extensive research carried out by archeologist George MacDonald in the 1960s and 1970s to document the history of the Haida villages of the Queen Charlotte Islands.

In this abridgement, MacDonald re …

The publication of Sticks & Stones, George Bowering’s first book of poems, has been one of Canada’s great literary mysteries for almost three decades. Rumoured to have been published by the Rattlesnake Press in 1962, yet only ever found in the darkened vaults of secretive bibliophiles in the form of imperfectly collated, incomplete press proofs …

Born at the end of the first volume in this autobiographical trilogy, the little Jovette sets off on her journey across the Land of Permanent Sacrifice in Mother of the Grass. Wrenched from her childhood paradise on the banks of the St. Lawrence, she is plunged into the child-battering hell of working-class Montreal, then later into the despairing …

Joseph Tussman’s The Burden of Office is a book about the nature of political authority. Consider the symptoms of our present dilemma: leadership reduced to media “sound bites,” legitimate public power sold off to the marketplace in the name of “privatization,” citizens transformed into dubiously literate consumers in a Global Village. Ca …

The Canadian Yearbook of International Law has been published under the auspices of the Canadian Branch of the International Law Association since 1963. Each volume contains articles on important and topical issues as well as book reviews, notes and comments, sections on Canadian practice in international law, a digest of important cases, and comme …

This book deals with Canada's oceans management policies since the conclusion of the 1982 Convention of the Law of the Sea. That Convention set out a jurisdictional framework for the management of the world's oceans, but it did not provide states with precise guidance on all the issues that can arise. As a state with one of the world's longest coas …

One of Canadian poetry's best-kept secrets is Maureen McCarthy, whose first book She Reminds Me of Vermeer drew accolades across the country. Nine years later, her second collection drew even higher praises.

"I have the sense of seeing things with her eyes and mind, of actually being in her situation, and it's this intimacy that gives her poems pow …

Once again, Kathleen Dalzell has captured the mystery and the adventure of the Queen Charlotte Islands. In this, her third book on the islands, Dalzell focuses on her parents, free-spirited pioneers who risked everything to settle on the islands they loved. The result is a story that is both fascinating and informative, a look at history from the i …

Tom Wayman has earned an international reputation as a work poet, anthologist and essayist. This new collection of 64 poems deals with blue-collar working conditions, labour strikes and unemployment, the hierarchy of business and its philosophy of "money above all considerations" in the workplace. Some new travel poems and a few well-chosen comment …

One of the first books published to deal with the phenomenon of residential schools in Canada, Resistance and Renewal is a disturbing collection of Native perspectives on the Kamloops Indian Residential School(KIRS) in the British Columbia interior. Interviews with thirteen Natives, all former residents of KIRS, form the nucleus of the book, a fra …

With over 100 illustrations, including archival photographs, contemporary paintings, and cartoons, this book is the first pictorial history of the Chinese in Canada. It spans east to west, from maritime ports to the goldfields of British Columbia, the railway across the continent, and the Chinese restaurants and laundries of the prairies.