While researching John Bowerman Ferguson and the BC Stationery and Printing Company, I came across this ad, which illuminates (albeit fuzzily) what readers could find on the shelves of BC bookstores in 1887:
For sixty cents per volume, readers could walk away with now-classic works by Charles Dickens, Johnathan Swift, Victor Hugo, and Sir Walter Scott.
They could also find authors less familiar today (at least to me), like Jane Porter, Regina Marin Roche, Anne Bowman, Holme Lee, and Jane R. Sommers (humph…the women seem to be the ones whom history let fade into the mist).
All book images above are from HathiTrust, where modern-day readers can find and freely download most, if not all, of the books in the BC Stationery Company list.
