New Hogtown Press
New Hogtown Press was a Canadian left-wing publisher active during the 1970s and 1980s. History The press originated as the literature service of the Canadian Union of Students (CUS), producing and distributing pamphlets on education, Canadian political economy, and other issues during the late 1960s. When the Canadian Union of Students dissolved in 1969, a group of Toronto CUS activists decided that the literature service should be kept going as an independent organization. They formed Hogtown Press, continued distributing the CUS pamphlets, and began producing and distributing new titles as well. After a period of time, the original collective moved on, and in 1972 a new group, initially funded by the University of Toronto Students’ Administrative Council, took over the operation. The new collective shifted the project's focus away from the campus to a broader range of issues, and changed the name to New Hogtown Press. Subsequently, the press became an independent non-profit corporation. The all-volunteer collective began to publish a substantial number of new pamphlets, with particular emphasis on Canadian working class and radical history, women's liberation, and social history. New Hogtown Press also became a distributor for pamphlets produced by a broad range of other small left-wing publishers and collectives, such as Dumont Press Graphix, The Last Post, This Magazine is About Schools, Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Portugal's African Colonies (TCLPAC), Latin American Working Group, Development Education Centre (DEC), Better Read Graphics, NC Press, Women's Press, Exploding Myths Comic Book Collective, Pollution Probe, Peoples Press, New England Free Press, Black and Red, the New Tendency, Wages for Housework, Industrial Worker, New Star Books, Socialist Reproduction, and Press Gang Publishers. In 1975, Hogtown started to publish books as well as pamphlets. The first title off the press was Jesse Lemisch's On Active Service in War and Peace, which documented the way in which the American historical profession had put itself in the service of American state and corporate power. By 1975, more than 12,000 of its pamphlets had been distributed across Canada and internationally. Subsequent titles included The Great War and Canadian Society, Imperialism, Nationalism, and Canada, and Eight Men Speak. Members of the collective during its period of peak activity included Richard Wright, Joel Lexchin, Russell Hann, Gregory Kealey, Thom Schofield, Craig Heron, Krys Dobrowolski, Ulli Diemer, Elaine Farragher, Lori Rotenberg, Daphne Read, Miriam Ticoll, Karolyn Kendrick, and Gus Richardson. An ongoing challenge for Hogtown was that of setting publishing and political priorities. Some members were primarily interested in academically oriented manuscripts, especially in the fields of Canadian labour, women's, and social history. These were publications which would typically take several years to move from their date of conception to their publication date. Other collective members, who saw the primary mandate of Hogtown as popular education, were more concerned with publishing popularly oriented materials which dealt with current issues and which could be written, published, and distributed quickly. From a business point of view, neither kind of title could be counted on to generate reliable revenue