Goose Lane Editions – the oldest independent press in Canada – celebrates its 70th birthday this year.

The press, founded in 1954 by poet, critic, translator, and professor Fred Cogswell and his colleagues at the University of New Brunswick’s English department, began very humbly. Fiddlehead Poetry Books grew out of Cogswell’s work editing for The Fiddlehead, the quarterly literary journal that was established in 1945. The group convinced the university to pay for one book a year, with manuscripts to be chosen by an editorial board, but as Roy MacSkimming notes in the second edition of his book The Perilous Trade, an overview of the publishing industry in English Canada, the arrangement didn’t last long.

“After three years, Cogswell broke with his board to publish, on a hunch, a collection of poems with the curious title Emu, Remember!, by an unknown named Al Purdy,” MacSkimming writes. “The next year, the university withdrew its support.”

Cogswell went on to run the press for 24 years on his own salary, “assisted only by the occasional volunteer,” MacSkimming writes. Cogswell published chapbooks by a wide range of poets, increasing the number of volumes the press put out once Canada Council block grants became available.

The press took up the name Goose Lane Editions in 1981, when Cogswell retired and passed the business on to writer Peter Thomas. Thomas moved the press to a garden shed on Goose Lane in Fredericton, and the press has been known as Goose Lane Editions ever since.

Thomas added fiction and nonfiction to the press’s list. Several years after taking over, he hired current publisher Susanne Alexander as an intern. In 1989, Alexander and her colleague Julie Scriver bought shares of the press from Thomas and took over operations, bringing in Laurel Boone to run editorial operations.

Goose Lane continues to issue works of poetry under the icehouse poetry imprint, launched in 2012. The company has also developed a reputation for its strong fiction and narrative nonfiction list, as well as an art book program in collaboration with Canada’s most prestigious galleries and museums.