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The Porcupine’s Quill is located in two nineteenth-century brick storefronts on the Main Street of Erin Village in Wellington County, about an hour north-west of Toronto on a branch of the West Credit River. The millpond in the back yard dates from 1826, give or take. Read on for further information about the press and its environs.

The Credit River, behind the shop in Erin, Ontario.

 

Mailing Address

The Porcupine’s Quill
68 Main St., Box 160
Erin, ON
Canada
N0B 1T0
phone: 519 833 9158
fax: 519 833 9845
email: pql@sentex.net

Connect with Us

Ordering & Administration

For ordering information, visit the Ordering Books section of our website.

For administrative inquiries, contact Elke Inkster.

Submissions

We are not accepting new submissions at this time. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Artistic Odes to PQL

The Porcupine’s Quill

An AI Poem by Marcel Gagné
in collaboration with GPT-3 software

I write for you and for myself

and for no one else

not for money or for fame

or to impress those who don’t know me.
So I try to write the way I would speak,
if that were still possible—direct and true,
without false modesty or bravado.
Without fear of being misunderstood.

I want my poetry to be a windowpane,
a view through which you can see yourself clearly:

your strengths; your weaknesses. Your loneliness. Your joys.

Your anger—at injustice, at how things are, at those who hurt
you.

Your struggles with self-esteem and self-loathing.

Your failures and disappointments; your griefs and losses;

your love affairs. The people in your life—family, friends,
co-workers.

The places you’ve been and are going—places where you live;
places where you’ve traveled;

places where you’ve never been.
The books you love and the ones you don’t like; the movies,
music and art that nourish you.
The things that make you feel alive or dead inside.

I write for myself, but I also write for you.

Reposted with permission from marcelgagne.com

 

A Portrait of Tim Inkster

A watercolour portrait of Tim Inkster by Norman MacDonald. October 2009 at the Busholme Inn, Erin Village, Wellington County.

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 Canada Book Fund (CBF) is also gratefully acknowledged.

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“Imagine a small publisher that not only cares about good writing, but also goes to immense lengths to make that writing accessible in permanent, beautiful form. Imagine a small publisher that, instead of gluing its pages into the spines of books (thereby making it likely that the book will one day disintegrate), sews the pages together so that they’ll never fall apart. Imagine a small publisher dedicated both to discovering new, young writers and to reprinting the best Canadian literature from the past.... You’re imagining The Porcupine’s Quill.”
—Mark Abley, the Montreal Gazette