History
The company was founded as Coach House Press in 1965 by artist Stan Bevington. It is known for publishing early works by writers such as Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Ann-Marie MacDonald, George Bowering, Nicole Brossard, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Christopher Dewdney, bpNichol and Anne Michaels, Darren O'Donnell, Sean Dixon, Greg MacArthur, and Amiel Gladstone.
Coach House was at the centre of a number of innovations in the use of digital technology in publishing and printing, from computerized phototypesetting to desktop publishing. Notably, the pioneering SGML/XML company, SoftQuad, was founded by Coach House's Stan Bevington and colleagues Yuri Rubinsky and David Slocombe.
In 1991, Coach House was split into two separate companies: the printing house Coach House Printing, headed by Bevington, and the book publisher Coach House Press, headed by Margaret McClintock. Bevington subsequently tried, unsuccessfully, to reacquire the publishing company. Ultimately, the book publisher declared bankruptcy in 1996, and later the same year Bevington moved the printing company back into book publishing.
The company is located in several former coach houses on bpNichol Lane, near Spadina and Bloor, which were rented from Campus Co-operative Residence Incorporated. In 2004, controversy arose when the media reported that the cooperative would be demolishing the coach house buildings, and politicians and public interest groups campaigned to have the buildings declared a heritage site. In 2009, the company directly acquired the buildings for the first time in its history.
Read more about this topic: Coach House Books
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)