The Porcupine's Quill
Celebrating thirty-five years on the Main Street
of Erin Village, Wellington County
Catalogues
A few catalogues from recent seasons which document (roughly) the transition from John Metcalf's seventeen-year tenure as fiction editor, to George Walker's current attempt to re-position the Porcupine's Quill as a 21st-century literary publisher.
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 Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) is also gratefully acknowledged.
“Imagine a small publisher that not only cares about good writing, but also goes to immense lengths to make that writing accessible in permanent, beautiful form. Imagine a small publisher that, instead of gluing its pages into the spines of books (thereby making it likely that the book will one day disintegrate), sews the pages together so that they'll never fall apart. Imagine a small publisher dedicated both to discovering new, young writers and to reprinting the best Canadian literature from the past.... You're imagining The Porcupine's Quill.” —Mark Abley, the Montreal Gazette
