ECW Press
Canadian book publisher

ECW Press is a Canadian book publisher located in Toronto, Ontario. It was founded by Jack David and Robert Lecker in 1974 as a Canadian literary magazine named Essays on Canadian Writing. They started publishing trade and scholarly books in 1979.
ECW Press publishes a range of books in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, sport, and pop culture. In 2015, Publishers Weekly listed ECW Press as one of the fastest-growing independent publishers in North America.
History
The company was founded by Jack David and Robert Lecker in 1974 as a Canadian literary magazine named Essays on Canadian Writing. Five years later, ECW published its first books—trade and scholarly titles. It started with two principal series: the Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors (ABCMA) and Canadian Writers and Their Works (CWTW). Through the 1980s, ECW upgraded its typesetting facilities, published reference titles and began to service third-party clients, creating books for corporations to use for promotional purposes and events such as anniversaries.
In the 1990s, ECW re-commenced trade publishing and expanded its scholarly and reference lines for high school and public libraries.
The public source identifies “ECW Press” as canadian book publisher. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Press, Canadian and book.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5322780. VIAF identifies the subject as 137764636. The Library of Congress control number is no2004019304. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974, 1979 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “ECW Press” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.