You couldn’t find a more optimistic person than David Caron, owner and co-publisher of ECW Press, when it comes to the future of the publishing industry, and he is very proud of the company he’s been with for 10 years. Started 40 years ago by Jack David and Robert Lecker, ECW began as a journal that published essays about Canadian writers. Caron notes, “There was an emerging new canon of Canadian writers that didn’t have that body of critical analysis that earlier authors had, so this was filling that void.”
It was a natural step for writers connected to the journal to offer their manuscripts to Jack David for publication; ECW Press was incorporated, and the transition was made three years later to a publishing house. Some of the early writers on its list included Hugh Hood, Leon Rooke, and Eric Ormsby.
Show Daily wanted to know if ECW Press has a particular area of expertise. Caron says, “For us it’s about passion for what we’re publishing. The editors that we have acquire books in subjects they know about, so we have nine or 10 different areas that we consistently publish in.
Although the company first started publishing fiction, it quickly moved into creating series about Canadian authors and their works. “In the early years of the press, we did major series as academic and reference materials, so libraries were an important market for us for a good 15 years,” says Caron. “When funding for libraries started to decline, both in Canada and the U.S., that was something we had to wrestle with, so we went after the trade market and became more of an international publisher.”
Jack David was quite prescient when he first started signing authors, because he included a clause in the contract for digital rights. Caron says, “Jack had an understanding about the electronic side of things, even it if it was just microfiche. From early on a lot of our nonfiction material was available digitally through EBSCO.”
ECW Press will formally celebrate its 40th anniversary at the end of October in Toronto under the sponsorship of the annual International Festival of Authors. The company is also putting together a festschrift of remembrances over the last four decades from authors and people involved with the press.
At the Legato Publishers Group booth (1329), ECW will be giving away limited edition posters tied in with Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words (Sept.), a collection of conversations between musician/journalist Malka Marom and her close friend, Joni; ARCs of Catherine Gildiner’s Coming Ashore (Oct.), the third book in her series of memoirs; and today, author Arjun Basu signs copies of Waiting for the Man (Apr.) at 1:30 p.m.
