Lost Ottawa – the Book was the best selling local interest book in Canada last year.
That’s right! According to our friends at Chapters/Indigo, we sold more copies of Lost Ottawa than anyone sold books about Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver.
We’re pretty proud of that result. It makes us feel like we did something positive for the community and the community responded.
I know from all the book signings I did that people really enjoyed the stories, so naturally a new book is in the works. Here’s the original of the picture we’ve chosen for the cover. It’s a Tuck postcard from their “Oilette” series, based on original black and white photographs, but coloured to look like oil paintings. In fact our first cover was from the same set, containing six postcard pictures of Ottawa.
Why this particular picture, you ask? Well, this may seems a bit over-the-top, but Lost Ottawa to me is not some place in the past that was once factual and is now gone. It’s a place in the mind. In the imagination, where where you can “put yourself in the picture” and imagine the possibilities. I wanted a somewhat whimsical picture that captured that feeling. Who can’t imagine driving their sweetheart in an open car beside the Rideau Canal on the original Government Driveway with the Rideau Queen steaming majestically alongside!?
Plus, there’s plenty of “lost.” The steamboats, for one thing. The ancient cars, the rustic staircase, a canal that doesn’t look like that anymore, with the original Exhibition buildings at Lansdowne Park peaking out in the distance.
As for the contents of the new book, it follows the same format as the first, containing 75 of the most popular posts from our Facebook site, as voted by people themselves through their likes, comments, and shares.Whereas the first book had the most popular stories from our first four years on Facebook ending in 2016, the new book has the best stories since then, written up the same way with a picture, a short blurb, followed by the edited comments arranged in the form of a dialogue.
There are definitely a few classics — people really did love their Capitol Theatre! Otherwise we’ve got new stories ranging from the Grace Hospital to the Diamond BBQ, and watching Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Towne to Bill’s Joke Shop to. We’ve got many more stores, plazas, and restaurants, and we’ll have talk more about them in a few days.
Right now you can pre-order Lost Ottawa – Book Two by clicking here, or by clicking the picture in the sidebar. That means you’ll be getting your copy just as soon as the printer can print them and the mail carrier can deliver them to your door!