National Network for Equitable Library Service

This full-colour field guide to the marine life of coastal British Columbia, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and northern California is perfect for divers, boaters, beachwalkers and snorkellers of every experience level. The Pacific Northwest is home to more than 7,000 species of invertebrates, fishes, marine mammals and marine plants. This concise handbook is a ready reference to the 420 most common species that can be observed and identified without being disturbed.

Although Emily Carr is now considered a Canadian legend, the most enduring image is that of her pushing a beat-up old pram into downtown Victoria, loaded with dogs, cats, birds-and a monkey. Woo, a Javanese macaque whom Carr adopted in 1923, has become inextricably linked with Carr in the popular imagination. But more than that, in her short lifetime Woo became equally connected to Carr's life and art. Born to a strictly religious family, Carr was never able to reconcile her wild and passionate nature with the stifling mores of the well-to-do Victorian society in which she was raised.

Where Mountains Meet the Sea commemorates the 125th anniversary of the District of North Vancouver's incorporation as a municipality. Combining hundreds of illustrations with the personal accounts of residents and a lively text, the book presents the story of North Vancouver in all its colour and complexity.

A popular history of late 19th and early 20th century railways as they blasted their way into southeastern British Columbia. When Trains Ruled the Kootenays is the story of how the railways established an extensive and convenient transportation network to haul ore from the mines, move people, and service the communities during the early years of the 20th century in the Kootenay region of British Columbia. Terry Gainer's latest book documents sixty years of change in the railway industry of British Columbia.

The fascinating origin story of Wilson Duff, the pioneering BC anthropologist and museologist remembered for his contributions to research on First Nations cultures of the Northwest Coast. Wilson Duff was born in 1925 in the city of Vancouver and his turbulent early years were shaped by the Great Depression and the Second World War. An intelligent child, he quickly progressed in school. After one year at the University of British Columbia, he signed up for the Air Force. An analytic thinker, Duff excelled as a navigator on a Liberator bomber based in India.

Part love story, part survival story, part meditation on family dysfunction, this offbeat memoir chronicles the unpredictable life of a young wife and mother on Gabriola Island. In 1989, twenty-three-year-old Margot Fedoruk left Winnipeg and her volatile Slavic-Jewish family for the wilds of BC to work as a tree planter and to contemplate her mother's untimely death from cancer.

The moving memoir of a writer—a biographer of historical animals—whose life was forever changed when a rescue dog named Freddie came into his life. Rescued from a puppy mill in 2010, Freddie was a bright light in the lives of his human companions and the ultimate muse for biographer Grant Hayter-Menzies to explore the human-animal bond in his books. As Grant helped Freddie overcome the fears and traumas of his early years, Freddie in turn helped Grant through some of the most challenging years of his personal and professional life.

Longtime fisherman and Sointula resident Jon Taylor dishes up hilarious yarns from his life off northern Vancouver Island. Capturing the "rough but reasonable" freedom of Malcolm Island, Taylor recounts the bizarre but enticing lifestyle of a fisherman and his remote community—"haywire tightwads" for skippers, rotten fish in the hold that become "three thousand humpies in a warm, pink soup," and the kind of integrity you don't often see.

A fascinating look at the world of small-scale textile farms along the Salish Sea and their pivotal role in sustainable, artisanal textile production and the slow fashion movement. Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands are part of a unique geographical region that can grow and process its own raw textile materials with transparency. This book explores the region's vibrant fleece and fibre community and introduces the public to this growing land-based textile economy.

A rivetingly imagined re-telling of the voyages of Frances Barkley (1769–1845), who as a young woman travelled the world on a trading mission with her sea captain husband. Over two hundred years ago, Frances Barkley, a seventeen-year-old girl fresh out of a convent school in France, met twenty-six-year-old sea captain, fell deeply in love, and married him after a six-week courtship. Five weeks later, she stepped aboard his ship, the Imperial Eagle, to set sail on an eight-year voyage that would take them around the world twice. Frances Barkley's story is a remarkable one.