The Devil's Artisan

A ROGUES' GALLERY
OF THE CANADIAN BOOK AND PRINTING ARTS

Stan Bevington

`Head Coach' Stan Bevington founded the Coach House Press in an alley off Bathurst Street in Toronto in 1965. One of the company's early acquisitions was a nineteenth-century Challenge Gordon platen press which has come to symbolize Stan's fascination not only with the revolutionary changes in the printer's art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but also with earlier technologies.

The press moved, in 1968, to its current home in the alley off Huron Street behind Rochdale College, now called bpNichol Lane. For forty years the Coach House Press has maintained its advocacy of the avant garde, fostering the early careers of writers such as bpNichol (The Martyrology) and Michael Ondaatje (The Dainty Monsters) as well as George Bowering, Di Brandt, Nicole Brossard, Frank Davey, Daphne Marlatt and David McFadden. Coach House had a monster hit in 2001 with the publication of Christian Bok's Eunoia, which won the Griffin Prize for poetry the following year.

Self-described as `a refuge for the refined, an asylum for the aesthete, and a sanctuary for the scribe', Coach House is a unique Canadian institution. Stan Bevington's presence there has been the key to its success. He is a master printer and is responsible for the innovative design and high standards typical of works produced at Coach House Printing. Stan has been awarded several honours for his contribution to Canadian printing and publishing, including multiple Alcuin Society citations for excellence in book design. In 1999 he received the William Kilbourn Award, sponsored by the Toronto Arts Council, which celebrates 'an individual whose work is a celebration of life through the arts in the City of Toronto'. In 2005, Stan was awarded the Janice E. Handford Small Press Award, in recognition of his advancement of the cause of small and literary Canadian publishing.