Coracle Press

Coracle is a small publishing press directed by writer and artist Erica Van Horn and poet, artist and editor Simon Cutts. Based in London from the nineteen seventies and since 1996 from what was a small farm between the hills of South Tipperary, Ireland.

Highly regarded, and held in important collections internationally, it is a huge privilege for Books About Art to have been entrusted with the care and dissemination of this valuable collection - the remainders of decades of work by Simon, Erica and their collaborators.

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.

The activities of Coracle have been important for over thirty years because it has encouraged the book - both in terms of manufacture and reception (printing and stitching as much as turning a page and reading) 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