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.
“Speaking personally, without the Porcupine's Quill and a few scattered anthologies, my best life's work, four volumes of stories, would already be dead and forgotten. PQL gave them second breath. If they go down a third time, no one can save them. But books are hardy and float like cork; a few hundred of my PQL volumes are lodged in libraries and on the Internet, there may be some in scattered bookstores and even in people's homes. If they survive at all, they owe their life to the EMS team from Erin, Tim and Elke Inkster, and of course, John Metcalf. The rest, dear reader — and this is no literary affectation — is up to you.” —Clark Blaise, author of Pittsburgh Stories
