Contact Press

The legendary Contact Press was founded by Raymond Souster, Louis Dudek and Irving Layton in 1952, and the first book to bear the Contact imprint was Cerberus: Poems, written by the three co-founders. For the next 15 years, Contact Press emerged as the most important poet-operated and self-financed small press in Canada. Between 1960 and 1967, it published important book-length collections by new and younger writers whose work had until then appeared in little magazines or may have been published in chapbook form. Its list of writers included Milton Acorn, Al Purdy, Gwendolyn MacEwen, John Newlove, Frank Davey, George Bowering and Margaret Atwood.