Coracle is a small publishing press directed by writer and artist Erica Van Horn and poet, artist and editor Simon Cutts, from what was a small farm between the hills of South Tipperary, Ireland since 1996. Mostly based in London from the nineteen seventies, as both a publisher, gallery, and a space for books, workfortheeyetodo became its last bookshop project there in the mid-nineteen nineties.
In this later remote form, it continues as printer-publisher, editor of spaces, employing 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.
we continue to wave a small handkerchief at the world, though decorative & equally unpractical, most probably purchased from some bazaar or emporium a considerable remove away from the chain-stores of the high street. Stuart Mills
All’s well in the secret spaces of modernity camouflaged by whitewash and thatch. Roger Conover
A huge part of the appeal of Coracle is their marginal and contrarian disposition.Working in rural Tipperary, in collaboration with a network of fellow poets, artists and editors, based for the most part outside Ireland, who are similarly interested in questioning the potential of publishing, they deliberately operate outside the institutional and commercial mainstream. Julie Bates