Tipperary based publishing press celebrates 30 years with new exhibition

Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts' move to Tipperary coincided with the evolution of the internet, which has helped them enormously in maintaining a business from such a remote location

Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn of Coracle Press Books

Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts have run the small publishing press Coracle from their home in the townland of Grange, outside Clonmel in Co Tipperary, for the past 30 years.

Both are writers and artists, and Coracle has served as a vehicle for their own creative endeavours as well as many others. Among those whose books they have published are the British land artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, and the American experimental writer Susan Hiller.

Cutts can only guess at how many titles they have produced to date. “If you include the handmade pamphlets and invitations and so on, it would probably come to 1,800 printed items,” he says. “About half of those are what you might loosely call a book.”

Cutts is a native of Derbyshire in Britain who began publishing poetry in the 1960s and founded Coracle in London in 1975. Van Horn, who grew up in Concord, New Hampshire, became involved in the late 1980s. As well as making and publishing books, they ran a bookshop in the East End. Neither enterprise was particularly profitable, and they took on work as educators to supplement their income.

“We were doing some teaching down in Cork at the Crawford School of Art when we got this idea that we might like to try to buy a place in Ireland,” says Van Horn. “We were hitching from Clonmel to Fethard one day, and this farmer picked us up. When he heard we were looking for a house, he said, ‘oh, I have a bungalow you can buy’. He took us down this terrible road and showed us this terrible mess of a place, and Simon fell in love with it. So it kind of evolved from there.

“We worked very hard for the next seven years. We thought we’d work on the house every summer and then go back to London in the winter months, but the London situation changed and we just dug in here.”

Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn run Coracle Press in Tipperary, which was founded in London in 1975.

Publishing is a precarious business at the best of times, but their move to Tipperary coincided with the evolution of the internet, which they acknowledge has helped them enormously in maintaining a business from such a remote location.

“It’s really the backlist that pays for the new activity now,” says Cutts. “Some of the early books are quite rare and sell at auction. So there’s a history and a past that supports the present. We also have a list of libraries, and some private collectors, that buy most of our publications.”

“There are also some small, specialist bookshops that deal particularly with small presses like ours,” says Van Horn. “There’s one in London, one in Amsterdam, and another in New York. They stock editions that might be limited to 300 or 500 copies. You have to go to the shops to find them.”

Asked to pick a favourite from among their publications, Van Horn opts for Too Raucous for a Chorus, a book she produced in 2018. “I’ve done several books distilling material from a journal I keep online,” she says. “ Too Raucous for a Chorus is based on texts from my journal that were specifically about our relationship with birds. It was recently translated into French by another small press in Geneva.”

Cutts chooses a book called An English Dictionary of French Place Names, which they published in 2004. “It basically takes all the names of French towns and villages that have some appurtenance in English,” he says. “They might mean something as an English word, or they might sound like an English word. So for instance there’s a weird little village called Condom in the middle of France. And then, under O, there’s Orgy, Orient and Orphan. Alongside each is the department name, to show it really exists. It’s all tab indexed, so it’s a kind of dictionary, in a way.”

Part of the attraction of living in the countryside is the opportunity it has given them to be outdoors. “We did a lot of walking while we were working on this place,” says Van Horn. “We’re in a nice little bowl between the Comeraghs and the Knockmealdowns and the Galtees. So we could go off in any direction. Within 10 minutes we can be up at the Waterford border in the Knockmealdowns and you can just start walking up the hill.”

“We once walked from here to Dublin,” says Cutts. “It took 10 days. But I’m 81 now, and I’m not so good at walking anymore.”

They accept that they cannot continue living where they are indefinitely. “We love the house,” he says. “We built it ourselves, more or less. But it’s got certain problems and it takes a lot of maintenance. The infirmity on my part means we probably will have to move.”

“But where is the million-dollar question,” says Van Horn.

“I’m on some weird medicine and I get very cold,” says Cutts, “so we tend to go to France for the winter months as it is. So maybe we’ll move south.”

Coracle's exhibition at South Tipperary Arts Centre. Picture: Kevin O'Donnell

In the meantime, both are working on their next books. “My current project is a tribute to an old man named Tommy, a good friend of mine who died a couple of years ago,” says Van Horn. “I’m trying to write a bit about our relationship because I’m always an outsider here. When I open my mouth, it’s obvious. But it’s important how you accept each other’s differences, and Tommy accepted that I didn’t know everything the way local people know it. He liked helping me find things out. Meanwhile, Simon is working on a more critical book on one of his projects at the Getty Centre in California.”

“It’s become the case that I’m dealing with stuff retrospectively a lot these days,” says Cutts. “There’s a guy writing a book about my activities as well, so I spend a lot of time in dialogue with him.”

The Coracle exhibition at South Tipperary Arts Centre will run into October. “We’ve tried to set it up as a reading room,” says Van Horn, “so you can pick up the books and look at them. You can read them all the way through, or you can just put that one down and pick up another. It’s by no means all of the books that we’ve ever produced. We tried to make a good cross-section, and there is more material on the walls. It’s not an exhibition to rush through. It’s a very quiet space, a place to go and spend time in.”

Coracle at South Tipperary Arts Centre. Picture: Kevin O'Donnell

• Coracle: Celebrating the Work of Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts runs at the South Tipperary Arts Centre until October 24. Further information: southtippartscenre.ie and coracle.ie