Surviving for 60 years as an independent publishing house is admirable. Surviving for 60 years as a Canadian independent publishing house is remarkable. But surviving for 60 years as a Canadian independent publishing house that launched with the slogan “Printed in Canada by mindless acid freaks” is something else altogether.

That’s exactly what happened to Coach House Books, inaugurated as Coach House Press by Stan Bevington in 1965. The then-22-year-old Bevington, a printer and graphic designer known at the time for silk-screening Canadian flags, purchased a Platen printing press and began to produce books out of a rundown coach house in Toronto. That coach house has since been traded in for an equally rambling and structurally questionable building that was once a horse stable on a lane behind the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library.

“I’m still wrapping my head around all the various changes over 60 years in terms of how publishing works and our place in the ecosystem,” says Alana Wilcox, Coach House’s editorial director, who began working with the press 25 years ago, and has been its face and guiding force ever since. “It’s hard for the younger staff to imagine a world where PDFs didn’t exist, for instance.”

It’s even harder to imagine a world in which Canlit itself didn’t exist. But that was, more or less, the situation when Bevington began publishing books. Coach House helped launch the careers of George Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, bpNichol, and Martin Vaughn-James. It took chances in both form and content, providing a space for Nichol to produce his eclectic sound poetry and publishing Bowering’s 1967 long poem Baseball in the shape of a pennant.

Wilcox attributes the press’s longevity in part to its ability to maintain an independent vision about publishing in Canada. “We’re really fortunate to not be constrained by corporate overlords,” she says. “We can take risks on some things that maybe a larger house would not be advised to do.”

That risk taking is baked into Coach House’s DNA and has aided the press in becoming one of Canada’s most venerated and honored independent publishers. Whatever changes may have occurred in the past six decades at Coach House—“There’s a lot less hashish involved,” Wilcox quipped—the first wave of its authors set the template for the unconventional literary publishing that Wilcox and the rest of the staff maintain to this day.

“I think of the first generation as being incredibly important in the work that I do and how I do it,” says André Alexis, whose 2015 novel Fifteen Dogs won the Giller Prize, a first for Coach House and still a rarity among Canadian-owned independent publishers. “I have a hard time thinking of my work being as it is without them. Coach House is somewhat formative in the writer that I am.”

Christian Bök credits Coach House with a willingness to take chances. His 2001 volume Eunoia won the Griffin Poetry Prize and was, for quite some time, the bestselling book of Canadian poetry in history. (That status has since been usurped by the decidedly un–Coach House poet Rupi Kaur.) Each chapter in the book is composed of sentences containing only a single vowel. “I can’t see that any other publisher in Canada would entertain publishing books like Eunoia,” Bok says.

Suzette Mayr, a Calgary author whose 2022 novel The Sleeping Car Porter was the second book published by Coach House to win the Giller, attributes the press’s longevity to its purity of vision. “They resist following easy trends,” Mayr says. “Coach House is invested in publishing work that is truly cutting-edge and risky rather than work that is in any way predictable or cookie-cutter or derivative.”

This, according to Wilcox, is a welcome side effect of not needing to answer to shareholders or large-scale market forces. It provides freedom to engage in a more artisanal kind of publishing that can cater to a smaller, more niche audience. It also, Wilcox suggests, allows the press to focus on more local titles, such as the uTOpia series on Toronto as a living urban center, or the recently published Maggie Helwig book Encampment, about the author’s attempt to preserve a tent city of unhoused people on the grounds of the Anglican church where she is a priest.

Another facet of Coach House that sets it apart is the beauty of its books. Printed onsite using Zephyr Antique Laid paper, Coach House books are objets d’art, appealing to people who crave a more personal touch in a highly digitized age. The printer is operated by longtime production manager John De Jesus, whose care and know-how are apparent in each individual volume that rolls off the press. “Being able to produce beautiful books provides one avenue of entry for a readership,” Bök says. “Purchasing an item that is highly collectible and desirable in part guarantees some longevity.”

Sixty years after Bevington started producing books, that longevity is no longer in question. And as the press heads into its next 60 years, it is doing so in part by leaning into the kind of DIY mentality that characterized its earliest days. The books may no longer be produced by mindless acid freaks, but Coach House’s history is ever present in its daily endeavors. The proof? The press’s address is on bpNichol Lane.

Steven W. Beattie lives in Ontario and publishes the literary website That Shakespearean Rag.

Return to main feature.