Coach House Books, Toronto, ON

In 1965, a young typesetter named Stan Bevington, newly transplanted to Toronto from Edmonton, began printing versions of the new Canadian maple-leaf flag. With the money he made hawking these flags in hippie Yorkville, he rented an old coach house and bought a Challenge Gordon platen press. With a newfound colleague, Dennis Reid (now a curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario), he printed a book of poetry by Wayne Clifford. Writers and artists soon flocked to the little coach house with their projects, bpNichol’s Journeying and The Returns and Michael Ondaatje’s The Dainty Monsters among them. Coach House has always maintained a dual role in Canadian letters by both publishing and printing books.