By Joe Wiebe | December 2011

The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver
Harbour Publishing, $49.95
512 pages, including 500 photographs

The story goes that upon arriving in Vancouver from wintry Winnipeg in 1944, nine-year-old Chuck Davis looked up at his father and said, “I think we’ve come to the right place.” His initial fondness for the city would eventually grow into an obsession to know everything about Vancouver and its history and to share it with the general public. By the time he published The Vancouver Book in 1976, people had already started calling him Mr. Vancouver.

Although not a formally educated historian, Davis became Vancouver’s unofficial official historian, scouring archives and libraries and people’s personal collections in search of interesting documents or artefacts. He wrote regular columns in the Province featuring different aspects of Vancouver’s history, visited schools and conducted walking tours.

In the 1990s he began working on his magnum opus, a history of metropolitan Vancouver that would encompass every story and photo and scrap of detail he could find. He worked on it tirelessly, putting off publication deadlines year after year so that it wouldn’t be rushed into completion before it was ready.

But then he ran out of time himself. Last year, at age 74, Davis was diagnosed with three different cancers and given only weeks to live. The book was complete chronologically up to 1994, but there was no way he could finish the rest of it, so he put out a call for someone to take over the project. Davis died on November 20, 2010, knowing that his life’s work would still be completed.

That poignant story aside, The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver is a wonderful compendium for any Vancouverite on your Christmas shopping list, whether it’s someone newly arrived in the City of Glass or someone who’s lived here all their life.  Davis said he wanted this book to be “fun, fat and full of facts”—and that’s exactly what it is.