Pilgrimage to Coach House

At the corner of Coach House Books and the North Pole….hm, think we’ll choose Coach House.
It is not in Open Doors Toronto this time, but you can arrange for tours. We just dropped by. I had a ridiculous amount of being tongue-tiedness to be there in person. (Stutter is my mutter tongue.)
If hubby had not spoken up at I timidly stared into open doors, we probably would have gone and not gone in.

Here he is with bpNichol’s landmark poem.
There was a meeting going on upstairs and we just stopped by so we didn’t get the Magical Mystery Tour but were given a look around (by someone I should have taken the name of but didn’t).


He gave us these cool newly done sheets.

Tremolo by Ethel Harris was going thru the presses for the 7th time. It is a one-color press that is fed thru for the registration marks to line up each layer of color.

Each book cover is creased with this machine, the Gordon Press of their logo, before being folded and wrapped around the pages. It can score 400 covers per hour. You can see a corner of the type room in the background.
Micallef’s Stroll was being glued and trimmed. All along walls and windows are titles they’ve printed. (I was too trigger-shy to record all that.)

This is the linotype machine that originally did many of the first titles. You type a line and the machine pours and casts it. The machine was built in 1917 and was used until 1975. Now their books are laid out digitally, put by laser onto a film negative to make plates for printing.

Here’s a pic Brian took of me outside 80 bpNichol Lane.
P.S. Have you seen Epilogue: the future of print, a documentary with interviews of Joanne Saul, (Type Books), Stephen Fowler, (Monkey’s Paw Bookshop), Stan Bevington, (Coach House Books), Brian Morgan, (The Walrus Magazine), Don Taylor, (Don Taylor Bookbinding), Michael Torosian, (Lumiere Press), Akemi Nishidera, (KOZO Studio Gallery) and George Walker, (Biting Dog Press & OCADU).