A Magical Mystery Tour of the Coach House Press
On our last day in Toronto we finally found our way to the Coach House Press. I say finally because though it wasn’t all that hard to find once we were actually looking for it, it had been pretty hard to find when we weren’t looking and weren’t even in the neighbourhood.
A huge fan and consumer of Coach House Books, I would have been happy to just stand around bpNichol Lane looking at the Coach House they come from. Coach House founder Stan Bevington found us doing just that and invited us in. Turns out droppers-by can take a self-guided tour - Coach House publishes a Magical Mystery Tour pamphlet to this end. We consulted the hell out of that pamphlet, read fascinating facts aloud to each other such as, did you know that a sheet-fed one-colour Heidelberg offset printing press can go through six miles of paper a day, or that the bathroom at Coach House used to be a greenhouse?
We were so obviously intent on taking every step of the tour that after a while Nick Drumbolis took over from the pamphlet and then things got really interesting. The pamphlet describes Nick as “irascible.” He was lovely to us, demonstrating presses and folders, gluers and cutters with great finesse and filling in gaps in the pamphlet’s knowledge. We were somewhat dismayed to learn that after a book is printed its films are stored in a giant shelving unit known as the morgue and we developed an unhealthy fascination with the perfect bind gluer, in part because we just loved it’s name: AUTO-MINABINDA. Also, we still had Sean Dixon’s recent run-in with that machine fresh in our minds.
At the Coach House spring launch in Montréal, Dixon told a story about how he’d stopped in at the CHP and they’d offered him the opportunity I’m sure every author dreams of, to catch a copy of his own book – The Girls Who Saw Everything – coming literally hot off the presses. Well, hot off the binder. "The Girls" were already collated and all glued up when all involved except Dixon realized that they’d forgotten to put a cover in place. They were yelling NO! STOP! But the author wound up catching the coverless "Girls" by their hot glue spine. The glue is not made of horse-hooves and is heated to 300 degrees F, according to the pamphlet. Fortunately the author had heavily calloused hands, presumably from some activity other than writing, and no harm was done. We were only slightly disappointed that when Nick demo-ed the AUTO-MINABINDA for us the cover of the book in question was well in place.
Our self- and Nick-guided tour of the Coach House Press was one of the highlights of our trip to Toronto. It was almost a week ago already but we’re still trying to slip words like Heidelberg and AUTO-MINABINDA into casual conversation.
. . . . .
A huge fan and consumer of Coach House Books, I would have been happy to just stand around bpNichol Lane looking at the Coach House they come from. Coach House founder Stan Bevington found us doing just that and invited us in. Turns out droppers-by can take a self-guided tour - Coach House publishes a Magical Mystery Tour pamphlet to this end. We consulted the hell out of that pamphlet, read fascinating facts aloud to each other such as, did you know that a sheet-fed one-colour Heidelberg offset printing press can go through six miles of paper a day, or that the bathroom at Coach House used to be a greenhouse?
We were so obviously intent on taking every step of the tour that after a while Nick Drumbolis took over from the pamphlet and then things got really interesting. The pamphlet describes Nick as “irascible.” He was lovely to us, demonstrating presses and folders, gluers and cutters with great finesse and filling in gaps in the pamphlet’s knowledge. We were somewhat dismayed to learn that after a book is printed its films are stored in a giant shelving unit known as the morgue and we developed an unhealthy fascination with the perfect bind gluer, in part because we just loved it’s name: AUTO-MINABINDA. Also, we still had Sean Dixon’s recent run-in with that machine fresh in our minds.
At the Coach House spring launch in Montréal, Dixon told a story about how he’d stopped in at the CHP and they’d offered him the opportunity I’m sure every author dreams of, to catch a copy of his own book – The Girls Who Saw Everything – coming literally hot off the presses. Well, hot off the binder. "The Girls" were already collated and all glued up when all involved except Dixon realized that they’d forgotten to put a cover in place. They were yelling NO! STOP! But the author wound up catching the coverless "Girls" by their hot glue spine. The glue is not made of horse-hooves and is heated to 300 degrees F, according to the pamphlet. Fortunately the author had heavily calloused hands, presumably from some activity other than writing, and no harm was done. We were only slightly disappointed that when Nick demo-ed the AUTO-MINABINDA for us the cover of the book in question was well in place.
Our self- and Nick-guided tour of the Coach House Press was one of the highlights of our trip to Toronto. It was almost a week ago already but we’re still trying to slip words like Heidelberg and AUTO-MINABINDA into casual conversation.
. . . . .
posted by J. R. Carpenter at
10:59 AM
1 Comments:
Nice story.
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