Louis Dudek, together with Irving Layton and Raymond Souster, founded Contact Press in 1952, a venture which would publish most of the important Canadian poets of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956 he established the McGill Poetry Series, which launched the careers of Leonard Cohen and Daryl Hine.
In 1968 Dudek advised Tim Inkster (then an English student at University College, University of Toronto) to abandon publishing in favour of distribution. Sage advice, which Inkster (thirty-five years later) is still trying to master.
Louis Dudek died in 2001.