Winner of City of Vancouver Heritage Award, 2001

Vancouver and Beyond is an anthology of 50 stories about British Columbia's Lower Mainland in the early years of the 20th century. These stories grew out of a prized collection of picture postcards. While some of the images are not all that uncommon, most of the pictures are rare survivors of the "golden age" of postcards, which encompassed the years between 1900 and 1914, the relatively short period when Vancouver ended its days as a frontier town and became a significant Canadian city.

Fred Thirkell (1930–2009) was born and educated in Vancouver. He obtained his Licentiate in Theology from Anglican Theological College in 1954, and worked as a minister in communities throughout BC and Nova Scotia. He also worked as program coordinator for the Anglican diocese of the Kootenays in Nelson, BC, and as a social worker for the Children’s Aid Society in Vancouver. Fred was keenly interested in history, and he got hooked on collecting vintage postcards while living in Nova Scotia. He later began matching these rare images he had collected with mini-histories. He and Bob Scullion published their first book featuring postcards in 1996.

Fred Thirkell's profile page

Bob Scullion (1937-2009) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, one of Britain's best-preserved Victorian cities. Living there gave him an enthusiasm for and appreciation of cities and their history.

He and Fred Thirkell published eight books with Heritage House in the postcard genre. Four of their books won City of Vancouver Heritage Awards: Breaking News, Frank Gowen's Vancouver, Vancouver and Beyond and Postcards from the Past.

Bob Scullion's profile page