The Porcupine's Quill
Celebrating thirty-five years on the Main Street
of Erin Village, Wellington County
Browse by Title
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.
“I can't, as the expression has it, say enough about Tim and Elke. I can't say enough because some of it would probably stray towards whingeing about this or that, namely why didn't Tim butter me up a bit more when I felt I needed it. Fact is, of course, that buttering up wasn't Tim's thing, and eventually I got the message on that and stopped whingeing. A foolish complaint anyway, really. what Tim and Elke DID was only to produce the finest-looking and longest-lasting (all that hand sewn classiness) and best-edited (with Doris Cowan's help, but they need to be credited with the good taste to bring her on board) small-press books in the country, on the continent probably. The two books they did for me outshine any other of my collected-poetry-works in every respect for which they were responsible.” —Don Coles, author of Kurgan
