Founded | 1965 |
---|---|
Founder | Stan Bevington |
Country of origin | Canada |
Headquarters location | Toronto, Ontario |
Distribution | Publishers Group Canada (Canada) Consortium Book Sales & Distribution (US) |
Publication types | Books |
Official website | www |
Coach House Books is an independent book publishing company located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Coach House publishes experimental poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction. The press is particularly interested in writing that pushes at the boundaries of convention.
The company was founded as Coach House Press in 1965 by artist Stan Bevington. It is known for publishing early works by writers such as Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Ann-Marie MacDonald, George Bowering, Nicole Brossard, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Christopher Dewdney, bpNichol and Anne Michaels, Darren O'Donnell, Sean Dixon, Greg MacArthur, Matthew Heiti, and Amiel Gladstone.
Coach House was at the centre of a number of innovations in the use of digital technology in publishing and printing, from computerized phototypesetting to desktop publishing. Notably, the pioneering SGML/XML company, SoftQuad, was founded by Coach House's Stan Bevington and colleagues Yuri Rubinsky and David Slocombe.
In 1991, Coach House was split into two separate companies: the printing house Coach House Printing, headed by Bevington, and the book publisher Coach House Press, headed by Margaret McClintock. Bevington subsequently tried, unsuccessfully, to reacquire the publishing company. Ultimately, the book publisher declared bankruptcy in 1996, and later the same year Bevington moved the printing company back into book publishing.
The company is located in several former coach houses on bpNichol Lane, near Spadina and Bloor, which were rented from Campus Co-operative Residence Incorporated. In 2004, controversy arose when the media reported that the cooperative would be demolishing the coach house buildings, and politicians and public interest groups campaigned to have the buildings declared a heritage site. [1] In 2009, the company directly acquired the buildings for the first time in its history. [2]
Coach House is one of the few Canadian publishing companies that prints its own titles; the printing operations also print books for several other small Canadian publishers and literary magazines, including Acta Victoriana and the Hart House Review .
The reputation of the new Coach House has been growing steadily since its rebirth in 1997, but it skyrocketed with the publication of Christian Bök's Eunoia. This work of experimental poetry won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002 and has sold over 19,000 copies. Coach House books have been the recipients of dozens of other awards and nominations, including the Governor General's Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award.
Its most recent successes have been a series of books of collected essays by Toronto writers on various aspects of their city. The first, uTOpia (2005), about various writers' notions of a perfectible Toronto, was a surprise hit and was followed by The State of the Arts (2006), GreenTOpia (2007) and HtO (2008) about water in the city. [3] Frequent contributors to the volumes include John Lorinc, Shawn Micallef, Derek McCormack, Dylan Reid, Bert Archer, Stéphanie Verge, Chris Hardwicke, Mark Fram, Liz Forsberg, Dale Duncan and Darren O'Donnell. Also recently published in 2020 was Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, edited by Kathryn Mockler, among others. [4]
In 2008, Coach House was awarded the Province of Ontario's "Arts Organization Award" as part of the "Premier's Award for Excellence in the Arts". [5]
Philip Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer and essayist.
Barrie Phillip Nichol, known as bpNichol, was a Canadian poet, writer, sound poet, editor, creative writing teacher at York University in Toronto and grOnk/Ganglia Press publisher. His body of work encompasses poetry, children's books, television scripts, novels, short fiction, computer texts, and sound poetry. His love of language and writing, evident in his many accomplishments, continues to be carried forward by many.
Gary Barwin is a Canadian poet, writer, composer, multimedia artist, performer and educator who lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He writes in a range of genres including poetry, fiction, visual poetry, music for live performers and computers, text and sound works, and writing for children and young adults. His music and writing have been presented in Canada, the US, Japan, and Europe.
George Harry Bowering, is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He was the first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
Patricia Penn Anne Kemp, better known simply as Penn Kemp, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, and sound poet who lives in London, Ontario. Kemp has been publishing her writing since 1972 and was London's first poet laureate, serving since 2010 to 2013.
Darren O'Donnell is a Canadian novelist, essayist, performance artist, playwright, director, actor and urban planner.
Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, essayist and translator. She lives in France.
Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings or Angela Marie Rawlings is a Canadian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist-researcher who works with languages as dominant exploratory material. Their practice seeks and interrogates relationality between bodies—be they human, more-than-human, other-than, non.
Sandra Alland is a Glasgow-based Scottish-Canadian writer, interdisciplinary artist, small press publisher, performer, filmmaker, and curator. Alland's work focuses on social justice, language, humour, and experimental forms.
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Stan Bevington is a Canadian book publisher who founded Coach House Books.
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The Porcupine's Quill is an independent publishing company in Erin, Ontario, Canada. The Porcupine's Quill publishes contemporary Canadian literature, including poetry, fiction, art and literary criticism. It is owned and operated by Tim and Elke Inkster.
The Mercury Press is a Canadian publishing company which publishes literary fiction, poetry, and non-fiction works by Canadians. Mercury has a substantial jazz list and has also published murder mysteries. Books published by Mercury have won or been shortlisted for awards including The Governor General's Award, The City of Toronto Book Award, and the Trillium Award.
grOnk, or GRoNK, was a Canadian literary magazine begun in 1967 by bpNichol and others (for example, David Aylward, David W. Harris, and Rah Smith. After the primary 8 series of 8 issues each were published, it was Nichol's efforts that maintained the irregular periodical, with guest editors including Nelson Ball, jwcurry, Steve McCaffery and R. Murray Schafer. An offshoot of Ganglia Press's Ganglia magazine, grOnk began with material gathered for Ganglia's sixth issue and became a monthly publication focusing on concrete poetry and "the language revolution" underway in Canada at the time, publishing a wide variety of "extralinear" writing from an international cast of contributors anchored in a context of parallel developments in Canadian literature. "GrOnk brought together British, Czech, American, Canadian, French and Austrian concrete and experimental practitioners..."
David UU, or David W. Harris, (1948–1994) was an accomplished concrete and experimental poet and an important small press publisher. Along with Bill Bissett and bpNichol, he was a pioneer of the concrete poetry movement in Canada, and perhaps the first Canadian poet to explore visual collage embodying literary, philosophical and language references. He also composed sound works, made 8mm short films, was a master collagist/montagist and performed in numerous performance art exhibitions.
"And I should mention to you that my last name is...just UU, the original form of the English letter W, which is also how it's pronounced." - David UU
Oberon Press is an independent Canadian literary publisher founded in 1966. It focuses mainly on Canadian fiction—particularly short stories—and poetry, but also publishes criticism, history, biography and autobiography.
Cormorant Books Inc is a Canadian book publishing company. The company's current publisher is Marc Côté.
Glenn Goluska (1947–2011) was a Canadian book designer and typographer. He was born on June 26, 1947, in Chicago and came to Canada as a student at the University of Toronto. After graduating, he worked in the United States for a few years. He was employed by the Northwestern University Library where he obtained a Poco Proof press and various typefaces. This was the first set of printing supplies Goluska had obtained and provided him with the means to begin printing. While working his press, Goluska would come across works by the Coach House Press. Goluska took interest in the publishings and would eventually be offered a job by the creator of the Coach House Press, Stan Bevington. Goluska accepted a job offer and moved to Canada to work with Coach House Press for a few years. He left Coach House Press to focus on letterpress printing: his imprints were Imprimerie Dromadaire and Nightshade Press.