Walking the Portes of Paris
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In this article
Welcome!
Welcome to the first Featured Books blog post where each week I will take a deep dive into one book, artist or publisher.
I will be featuring books from across our range of titles on art, photography, music, design, fashion, architecture, artists' books and creative culture.
I am starting with Walking the Portes: Winters in Paris 2014-2019 by Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts. They published the book in 2025 through their own press, Coracle in a limited edition of 300.
Since 2024 Books About Art has been the sole UK distributor of Coracle books and we currently have over 30 titles in stock including some rarities dating back to the 1980s.
Walking the Portes
Winters in Paris 2014-2019
Erica Van Horn & Simon Cutts
Cloth-bound Hardcover
13.2 x 2 x 18.2 cm | 216 pp
Coracle Press | 2025
Edition of 300
£15
The activities of Coracle have been important for over thirty years because it has encouraged the book - both in terms of manufacture and reception to be understood to issue forth and stand as a tangible space, a platform, for critical activity.
Andrew Wilson, Curator - Modern & Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain
Wonderful, personal, inspirational.
Where can I buy that cheese????!!!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
John Goodger
Books About Art customer
About Walking the Portes
Written and compiled by Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts, Walking the Portes documents time spent in Paris while house-sitting for friends who had departed for warmer climes. Erica and Simon were left to water their hosts' plants and to explore Paris from their base in the Marais.
The portes are the old city gates of Paris (39 access points encircling the city), but you won't find the walks in any tourist guidebook. Simon & Erica used this historic topography as a template for setting their walk agenda - each walk would start with a Métro ride to a porte from where they would make their way across the city back to the apartment, each walk forming a spoke on a wheel-like map.
And of course, they walked the city in the steps of a particular ancestry, the Walter Benjamin of the Arcades, the Guy Debord dérive or drift, and the ambiguity of place past and present that Georges Perec encounters in his Lieux. Thus Walking the Portes offers a delightfully personal view of Paris, each walk bringing it's own particularities, placing our walkers into an array of contexts where they find themselves ruminating upon everything from manifestations of late capitalism to the minutiae of daily existence.
What would seem unimportant incidents are treated with exquisite detail and fondness. I would give it all the stars that are available, a must.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
David Willets
Artist
From the Authors: On Walking and Working
Erica Van Horn
When we walk together, Simon leads. I have never minded that he walks hugely ahead of me. As long as I can see him in the far distance, I feel fine and confident. It is important for him to know exactly where he is and exactly where he is going. This offers me freedom - the opportunity to notice things; the chance to just be wherever we are.
Walking the Portes in Paris was a different kind of walking. I could not let Simon simply disappear into the far distance, so I needed to keep up with his urban pace. Our arrival back at the apartment in rue de Bretagne was our constant - if I had lost him in the streets of the city, I would eventually have been able to get home by myself, but the plan was that we leave home together and that we arrive home together.
Each time we set out from a Porte, we walked together and I noted details, activities, signs, people and buildings. Simon walked and directed us, but he thought about all kinds of other things - the sighting of one thing might set him off to think about something else. By the time he returned to his desk and sat down to write up that days walk he had usually gone off on a tangent that had more to do with where his mind, rather than his body, had travelled.
When we began to assemble our notes into a book I resisted his mental meanderings. My narratives told one story and his another, altogether different, story. Once I accepted the differences Walking the Portes found its form. Our feet walked the same walk, but it was never, not even once, the same journey.
Simon Cutts
Erica and I have lots of joint projects, some completed, some lying in potentia until the right moment strikes. Walking the Portes sort of began with Companions and Menus about our time in Italy in 1990, the book coming out in 1992/3. There is a perennial Book of Walks, which never seems to get finished, on the desktop since the late nineties.
Our different styles make it complicated to get the right tone in some of these combinations, and Erica is often much closer to the ground in her Living Locally approach, whereas I’m moving sideways and floating out some conjecture.
...erudite, often funny... remarkable observations, unique memories and original thought.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Jamie Warde-Aldam
Books About Art customer
Biographies
Erica van Horn (b. New Hampshire, USA 1954) is an American artist (and writer, editor, printer, bookmaker, and publisher) long transplanted to Ireland where she runs Coracle Press with her husband Simon Cutts.
Her outsider’s acumen is trained on the minutiae of daily life, collecting visual and textual details of what is often overlooked or seemingly insignificant.
The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn, was shown at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in 2010, where there is an archive of her books and papers.
Simon Cutts (b. Derbyshire, UK 1944), a writer, artist, designer and founder of Coracle Press and Gallery, is an eminent figure in the field of artist books in Britain.
As poet, artist and publisher, he has made books since the mid-1960s, firstly with Stuart Mills as Tarasque Press and then as Coracle. Cutts met Stuart Mills, poet and publisher, at the Trent Bookshop, in Nottinghamin 1964. They became friends and launched the poetry magazine Tarasque, as well as publishing small booklets and cards featuring works by Cutts, Mills, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ian Gardner and others.
For over 50 years Cutts, has published, through Coracle, a vast array of his own work and that of many artists, poets and writers.
...unpretentious and blessedly quirky. ....occasionally perplexed and sometimes grumpy, but always warm and humane. Thoroughly recommended.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Kevin Murphy
Architect and writer
About Coracle Press
Highly regarded, and held in important collections internationally, Coracle have been publishing, for over 50 years, to disseminate the work of artists, poets and writers. The press was based initially in London in the 1970s, then Norfolk, and for the last 30 years in a former farm nestled in the hills of South Tipperary, Ireland.
As printer-publisher and editor of spaces, Coracle employs many of the devices and formats of hypothetical publishing inherent in the small press. Inevitably, much of the content of the publishing is of the nature of the book itself, in both critical and playful dimensions. At the same time there is always the residue of poetry, and a concern with the mechanisms of the book as a manifestation of the poem itself, together with other books by artists, writers, and others without category.
The books themselves are not so concerned with craft tradition, limitedness of edition, hand-made paper and elaboration of binding, as with the plain and simple casebound book, the sewn paperback, the extensions of ephemera, and their availability.
Walking the Portes... renders these artists’ lived experiences of Paris and their deliberate way of being in the world together.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Robert Bolick
Curator - Books On Books Collection
Reviews
Wonderful, personal, inspirational. Where can I buy that cheese????!!!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
John Goodger, Books About Art customer
Walking the Portes... renders these artists’ lived experiences of Paris and their deliberate way of being in the world together.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Robert Bolick, Curator - Books On Books Collection
This elegant two-hander will delight any reader with more than a passing enthusiasm for the City of Light. In the pages of this erudite, often funny journal, seasoned flâneurs Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn show us that alighting the trottoir and placing one foot after another can lead to remarkable observations, unique memories and original thought.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Jamie Warde-Aldam, Books About Art customer
This book, as with all of Coracle publications, is beautifully produced. It has a tactile sense to it that encourages you to pick it up and hold. Inside the number, variety and originality of stories and day to day events are marvellous. They are alive to the happened event. What would seem unimportant incidents are treated with exquisite detail and fondness. It is a complete view of Paris, in a completely new and magical way. Written by two artists who always bring to their publications wit, originality and style. I would give it all the stars that are available, a must.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
David Willetts, Artist
This is not so much Benjamin, Aragon or Debord but more an affable and personal affirmation of Paris's walkability and the magic of a city whose life and variety belies its cliches. The flânerie of Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts is unpretentious and blessedly quirky. They have an eye for the weird, the odd and the coincidental as well as the obvious grandeur of the city. The accounts of their time in Paris are occasionally perplexed and sometimes grumpy, but always warm and humane. This is a book that made me want to return to the Paris I had lived and wandered in. Thoroughly recommended.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Kevin Murphy, Architect and writer
This pleasingly crafted volume brings together numerous short reports from a spell spent exploring the "mythic périphérique of the city [of Paris] by foot, These walks may have something in common with the psychogeographical explorations of lain Sinclair, say, but their laudable aim was to be less creepy and pretentiously suburban.
Michael Caines, Times Literary Supplement
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