The Porcupine's Quill
Celebrating thirty-five years on the Main Street
of Erin Village, Wellington County
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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.
“The Porcupine's Quill published my first book in 1993. Back then,‘acid-free Zephyr Antique Laid’ and ‘folded and sewn into signatures in the traditional manner’ were meaningless to me. I was simply delighted to be published. Two books and a dozen years later, I now see a book as more than just the story it contains. It's a physical object. When I hold a page of Bad Imaginings to the light, the pattern and texture of the paper remind me what paper really is — pounded fibres. I think of papyrus. I think of a cart full of rags. If I open the book in the middle of one of its signatures, I can touch the actual threads that hold the pages together. On the cover is a painting, not an image from a digital photobank. What a beautiful, tactile thing! The Porcupine's Quill is one of a very few presses in this country committed to the art of the book. Congratulations to Tim and Elke for their long service to beauty and permanence.” —Caroline Adderson, author of Bad Imaginings