ECW Press

ECW Press is a North American small press book publisher located in Toronto, Ontario. It was founded by Jack David and Robert Lecker in 1974 as a Canadian literary magazine named Essays on Canadian Writing. Five years later, ECW published its first books - trade and scholarly titles. It started with two principal series - the Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors (ABCMA) and Canadian Writers and Their Works (CWTW). Through the 1980s ECW upgraded its typesetting facilities, published reference titles, and began to service third-party clients, creating books for corporations to use for promotional purposes and events such as anniversaries. In the 1990s ECW re-commenced trade publishing, and expanded its scholarly and reference lines for high school and public libraries.

ECW now publishes literary fiction, poetry, and mysteries, as well as non-fiction, professional wrestling, television and film, memoir, business, personal finance, sports, true crime, humour, popular science, and travel. No longer just Essays in Canadian Writing, ECW came to stand for Entertainment. Culture. Writing.

ECW books have won the Governor General's Literary Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry, the Heritage Toronto Award, and the Independent Publisher Book Award. They have also been nominated for Canada Reads and the Trillium Book Award.

ECW continues to publish around 50 new titles a year, and has published thousands of books distributed throughout the English-speaking world and translated into dozens of languages.