Never before have as many outrageous and out-sized characters appeared in one place at the same time. Words like rogues, rascals, rapscallions, reprobates and rodomontades don’t completely describe these individuals; they are more than each or any combination thereof. They are scalawags.

In these pages you will encounter gamblers and adventurers, conmen and conwomen, rodomontades and ragamuffins, outright fools and outrageous liars. Scalawags, the lot of them.

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.

The follow-up to Eve Lazarus’s successful At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes, Sensational Victoria gives us a glimpse into aspects of Victoria rarely talked about in the tourist brochures or flowery garden guidebooks.

In Street Stories, Lindsay Mearns turns a sympathetic lens on the faces of Vancouver’s homeless and reveals them for the everymen and women they are.

For nearly forty years, Jim Christy has thrown—willynilly, and with neither rhyme nor reason—such seemingly random items into the box. Being a restless traveller, investigative journalist and raconteur, many of these items have rich and alluring stories attached to them. The Peek Frean’s biscuit box has provided the essential ingredients for a fascinating assortment of highly entertaining anecdotal tales called Sweet Assorted.

For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder – and one of the only women — in the Boilermakers Union. This is her story.

The City of Vancouver has been through a lot in its first 127 years. It has been a hotbed of political activism, technological innovation, and bitter racial tension. It is the site of the West Coast’s first electric light, and the nation’s first female police officers, as well as home to world-renowned actors, deadly snipers, twisted serial killers, UFOs, the founders of Greenpeace, an official Town Fool, and even the headquarters for the Canadian Ku Klux Klan. It’s a city on a journey … This Day in Vancouver is the story of that 127-year journey, one day at a time.

“Gaps, blank spaces in the language of polite conversation—academic discourse being but one example—are linguistic manifestations of human psychology. They are like black holes into which we conveniently drop undesirable concepts referring to things we fear on the deepest levels, things we would rather not face without a hedge of psychological defences: sex, death, bodily wastes, things unmentionable in polite society. But these things do not go away by virtue of their unmentionability; and neither do the words referring to them, though most are now relegated to the status of street language, slang, or ‘obscenity.’”

We honour the chorus line behind the star performer, the mug in the mugshot, the victim in the murder, the teens in the gang, and the “slum” in the path of the bulldozer.

By focusing on the stories of the common people rather than community leaders and headliners, Vancouver Confidential shines a light on the lives of Vancouverites that have for so long been ignored.