From L. to r.: Catherine Fancy, archives coordinator; Jeff Hennessy, Acadia University president and vice-chancellor, Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield; Jennifer Richard, dean of library and archives; Nancy Handrigan, vice-president, external relations.

Gaspereau Press co-founders Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield have donated the full working archives of the press – from its inception to the present day – to their alma mater, Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. (Both completed Masters degrees at Acadia.)

Gaspereau Press, which was based in Kentville, Nova Scotia, was founded by Steeves and Dunfield in 1997 and was known for its poetry list, design and typography, letterpress printing, and Smyth-sewn books. Over the years, Gaspereau Press has won more than 50 Alcuin Awards citations. Award-winning titles published by the press include the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud, and Governor General’s Award for Poetry winners, Execution Poems by George Elliott Clarke (2001), and Shadow Blight by Annick MacAskill (2022).

In 2024, Gaspereau announced that its literary publishing program was to be sold to Keagan Hawthorne of the New Brunswick-based micropress Hardscrabble Press. The Gaspereau Press name will be retained as the program moves to Sackville, New Brunswick, at the end of 2025. The offset printing and trade bindery part of the business will close at the end of the year as Dunfield retires and Steeves moves on to other pursuits that may include, as noted on the Alcuin Society website “producing fine letterpress books, chapbooks, and broadsides under a new press name.”

The donation to Acadia University was largely motivated by personal ties and the sense of community, according to Steeves, and it will also “allow him to continue to engage with the material and the scholars working with it.”

The materials will be housed in the archives at the university’s Vaughan Memorial Library. The donation includes “60.87 meters of textual records, graphic material, and ephemera,” which, when stacked, is the height of a 20-storey building, the university says. 

“Few small presses with as rich a history as Gaspereau have their archives fully preserved under one roof. Having both the archive and the full catalogue of books opens doors to research into the craft of book arts, the evolution of printing, design, typography, and publishing practices, not only in Canada but in the broader context of fine press traditions,” Jennifer Richard, dean of libraries at Acadia University, said in the press release.