The Spirit of Print
To know us is to know the people who create, produce, and sell our books.
We love the process of making books: auditioning fonts, laying out pages, searching for the perfect balance of black ink and white space. The collaborations are immensely gratifying too - with authors, of course, but with designers and printers and booksellers as well. We work with superbly talented cover artists such as David Drummond (Montreal), Natalie Olsen/Kisscut (Calgary), and Michael Vrana (Toronto), and our frequent consultant and collaborator, Rodolfo Borello of Associes Libres (Montreal).
As anyone who has been involved in publishing knows, the most agonizing weeks are those between the submission of files to the printer, and the arrival of cartons of finished books. One's thoughts are consumed by visions of errata, by the gnawing fear that some horrible and glaring mistake will only reveal itself after the book has been printed. Fortunately we have worked with exceedingly skilled and helpful professionals at Canadian shops such as Coach House, Marquis, and Webcom. Paresh Gosai at Expressbind has a brilliant conceptual understanding of book production and has solved every challenge we've put to him.
While Dumagrad books are now distributed by the wonderful team at LitDistCo (surely the most important single entity in ensuring the survival of small presses in Canada), for the first few years of our existence we were strictly self-distributed. Without the kindness and patience of individual bookstores we wouldn't have made it through those early years, and we are forever indebted to the people who keep those indies going - stores such as Book City, Type, Another Story and Queen Books in Toronto, and stalwart early supporters including Kingston's A Novel Idea, Montreal's Drawn and Quarterly at 211 Bernard, JH Gordon and (late, lamented) Bryan Prince Books in Hamilton, and many others. We encourage you to order our books from your favourite shop, as those LitDistCo people we mentioned ship to every store in Canada. That said, as much our very existence is predicated upon our hope that independent bookstores continue to thrive, we were very pleased when Indigo picked up Svetlana Lilova's Metaphysical Dictionary for many of its prime locations.