Mar 6, 2011
ECW Press is a North American small press book publisher located in Toronto, Ontario. It was founded by Jack David and Robert Lecker in 1974 as a Canadian literary magazine called Essays on Canadian Writing. Its first books belonged primarily to two series - the Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors (ABCMA) and Canadian Writers and Their Works (CWTW).
Throughout the 1980s ECW published a wide range of Canadian literary reference titles, and - in order to stay alive - began to service third-party clients, creating promotional books for corporations. In the 1990s ECW returned to trade publishing; at the time Publishers Weekly recognized it as one of the fastest growing and most diversified independent publishers in North America.
ECW now publishes literary fiction, poetry, mysteries, and 'fan-based' pop-culture titles on topics that include professional wrestling, MMA, music, and television and film. Thanks to its transformation, ECW has come to stand for Entertainment. Culture. Writing...or, as Jack David tells us, anything you may wish ECW books have won the Governor General's Literary Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry, the Heritage Toronto Award, and the Independent Publisher Book Award.
The company has published close to 1,000 books which are distributed throughout the English-speaking world and have been translated into dozens of languages.