File 23 - Wayzgoose ’89 Anthology

Dreadnaught Press was a Toronto printing collective and publisher. Dreadnaught Press was established in the mid 1970s with the intention of publishing poetry and excerpted literature using traditional fine press printing techniques. It was founded by Robert MacDonald, Elizabeth Abraham, Deborah Barnett, Ross MacDonald, and David Jang, and was the first incorporated worker co-operative in Canada. The press borrowed its name from Dreadnaught, a short-lived underground paper started by Robert MacDonald in the early 1970s, and was originally inspired by a passage from Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce.

The collective set up a working pressroom at 24 Sussex Ave., near the University of Toronto campus, where they composed, designed, typeset, and hand-printed materials using traditional letterpress equipment. Dreadnaught Press published the works of many Canadian poets and writers, including Margaret Atwood, A.F. Moritz, Marshall McLuhan, Susan Musgrave, and Jack Hannan, and worked with numerous designers, artists, editors, typesetters, and illustrators. Dreadnaught Press was part of a vibrant local printing community that developed in the Annex neighbourhood of Toronto in the 1970s, including neighbouring publishers Coach House Press and House of Anansi. In addition to their own projects, the collective completed commissioned design, typographic and printing work for a range of commercial clients.

Dreadnaught Press briefly expanded with a second shop (NovaDreadnaught) and handmade paper operation in Nova Scotia in the early 1980s, before disbanding altogether as founding members moved on to other endeavours. In the late 1980s, Deborah Barnett relaunched Dreadnaught as Dreadnaught Design, a design and communication firm that shifted primary focus away from hand-printing and took on larger scale projects for commercial clients.