Pioneer Hotel and Current Bookstore Share Similar Logo Across 135 Years

Crop of CVA Bu P243.1 – Greyhound Hotel with an illustration of a hound at its secondary entry off of Cordova Street. (Its principal entry was at 232 Water Street).

The logo of The Paper Hound Bookshop at SE corner of Pender at Homer

The Greyhound Hotel (1886-1890) at 232 Water Street and a contemporary bookshop called The Paper Hound at 344 West Pender Street share a strikingly similar logo. I stumbled across the hotel illustration on CVA’s database yesterday. The photo from which the above was cropped is a view of Cordova Street from Cambie. This is a very uncommon view of the Greyhound. Typically, it was photographed at its principal entry: 232 Water Street. There doesn’t appear to be a hound illustration at the Water Street entry. I assume the illustration at the Cordova entry was intended to lure folks who were walking down Cordova in search of accommodation.

The Greyhound was a small hotel with a brief history. It was apparently a pre-Great Fire hostelry on Water Street, so presumably it went up sometime in early 1886. It was rebuilt following the fire and seems to have been up and running by 1887. It had a single proprietor, Harry T. Cole from its opening until it was sold by Cole in 1890 to Louis Wider who renamed it the Occidental Hotel; it was later renamed the Sherman House. Cole left Vancouver after the sale of the Greyhound to move to Victoria where he took on the proprietorship of the Leland Hotel (World 21 July 1891). He married Mary J. Mavis of Langley in 1891 (World 8 Aug 1891). Cole retired from the hotel business in 1894 (World 16 Feb 1894). He died in Victoria in 1911 from pneumonia at the relatively young age of 50.

The Paper Hound Bookshop – my favorite bookstore in Vancouver – opened in 2013 at its current location on Book Row with Kim Koch and Rod Clarke as the friendly and helpful proprietors. The bookshop’s hound is actually modeled on the artist’s now-deceased whippet, Trooper. It was drawn by Victoria artist, Carrie Walker.

The principal visual differences between the hotel’s illustration and that of the bookstore are that the hotel hound was facing right (as opposed to the left-facing book hound), and the hotel hound seems to be flanked by trees while the paper hound is standing upon a book.

Ad in 1888 City Directory.