The Porcupine's Quill
Celebrating thirty-five years on the Main Street
of Erin Village, Wellington County
Awards & Acclaim: 1990
The Cult of Seizure by Rikki DucornetThe Cult of Seizure starts from a wonderfully lush photograph of a Florentine cavern by Tony Urquhart, and proceeds visually through a bestiary of the small creatures that crawl -- lizards, snakes, crickets ... all rendered in the style of the 19th century steel engraving, much after the manner of a dated zoology text.
1990—Alcuin Award for Excellence in Book Design,
Runner-up
Cells of Ourselves by Tony UrquhartSome drawings by Tony Urquhart, edited, elaborated and arranged around the idea of a cage by Gary Michael Dault.
1990—Alcuin Award for Excellence in Book Design,
Winner
Arrondissements by Daryl HineDaryl Hine, a Canadian poet who has travelled widely, frequently records in his verse the quality of this travelling and the characteristics of the places he has visited. None of these places has he described more precisely and more poignantly than Paris, where he lived for several years as a young man. Arrondissements is the most complete of his comments on the French capital. At once a dream-promenade, an erotic tale, and a meditation on beauty’s many forms, this brilliant suite of poems evokes a great city, quartier by quartier, and once again demonstrates the mastery of the poet who devised it.
1990—Alcuin Award for Excellence in Book Design,
Winner
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.