The Porcupine's Quill
Celebrating thirty-five years on the Main Street
of Erin Village, Wellington County
Awards & Acclaim: 2012
Dancing, with Mirrors by George Amabile Dancing, with Mirrors is George Amabile’s ‘lyrical retrospective’, a thoughtful fragmentation and re-arrangement of his personal history. These eleven ‘cantos’ tumble into and over each other in a rush of passion, memory, devastation, and quiet moments that promise renewal; here, Amabile’s talent for sounding the complex depths of everyday life shines like a beacon.
2012—McNally Robinson Book of the Year,
Shortlisted
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Lewis Carroll’s beloved children’s classic comes to life with over one hundred whimsical, eccentric and darkly humorous wood engravings, all created by the ‘Mad Hatter’ of Canadian graphic arts himself, the award-winning George A. Walker.
2012—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted
Beasts of New York by Jon Evans A violent, epic, action-packed urban quest full of very eccentric, often hilarious, extremely dangerous characters who also happen to be animals -- the wildlife of New York City, to be exact.
2012—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted
Brazilian Journal by P. K. Page A memory of Brazil and its natural beauty evokes calm, and a strange benediction, as poet P. K. Page recalls (for example) two coloured birds which alight on her husband, Arthur, at dusk, in Rio de Janeiro. Page’s three years in Brazil, from 1957 to 1959, retain this luminous, slightly surreal quality in the poet’s memory, ‘baroque’ she once called its landscape and culture.
2012—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted
Fine Incisions by Eric Ormsby Fine Incisions is a collection of twenty-four gracious, intelligent and occasionally fractious essays, wide-ranging in their interests and rigorous in their analyses. Ormsby’s reverence for language is luminously clear as he examines his international travels, the work of James Merrill, the state of North American literary criticism and more in a series of essays as vivacious as they are provocative.
2012—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted
Little Comrades by Laurie Lewis Little Comrades tells the story of a girl growing up in a dysfunctional left-wing family in the Canadian West during the Depression, then moving, alone with her mother, to New York City during America’s fervently anti-Communist postwar years. With wit and honesty, Laurie Lewis describes an unusual childhood and an adventurous adolescence.
2011—Globe Top 100,
Commended
2012—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted
Surpassing Pleasure by John Slater This energetic first collection moves freely from the world of professional snooker to drunken adolescent escapades. Slater contemplates the art of moving furniture, the marginalia of monastic scribes and daydreams in a Japanese garden. Depicting care or abandon, the poems reflect on that unique carefree care for language that is poetry itself.
2012—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted
The Porcupine’s Quill is remarkable in Canadian publishing in that most of the physical production of our journal is completed in-house at the shop on the Main Street of Erin Village. We print on a twenty-five inch Heidelberg KORD, typically onto acid-free Zephyr Antique laid. The sheets are then folded, and sewn into signatures on a 1907 model Smyth National Book Sewing machine.
To take a virtual tour of the pressroom, visit us at YouTube for a discussion of offset printing in general, and the operation of a Heidelberg KORD in particular. Other videos include Four Colour Printing, Smyth Sewing and Wood Engraving. Photographs of production machinery used on these pages were taken by Sandra Traversy on site at the printing office of the Porcupine's Quill, December 2008.
The Porcupine's Quill would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. The financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) is also gratefully acknowledged.