Simon Cutts | Olympia Typewriter

Simon Cutts

Olympia Typewriter

Docking, England: Coracle Press, 1994

[4] pp., 17 x 12 cm., spiral-bound

Edition of 70 signed and numbered copies

A laminated and spiral bound book containing a single image over a two-page spread, with the following text on the cover: 

"an ode for the recovery of an olympia splendia 66 typewriter originally designed by max bill in 1939 and once bought in nottingham in 1966 with elite pitch and its keys altered for accents then lost in a paris market street in 1987 another found at ludgate typewriters london in 1994 with pica pitch its

fraction keys identically altered for accents."

Simon Cutts | workfortheeyetodo

Simon Cutts

workfortheeyetodo

Tipperary, Ireland: Coracle Press, nd [c.1993]

6.5 x 20.5 cm.

Edition size unknown

Coracle Press founders Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn later teamed up with Maggie Smith to open Workfortheeyetodo, a "book-space" that operated as a bookstore, distribution centre and reference place for the activities exploring the book as a medium. The centre hosted exhibitions, displays, and readings, often exploring the intersection between poetry and visual art. 

Workfortheeyetodo operated from 1992 to 1997. This undated enamel plaque is thought to be from the first year of operation. It features corner holes for hanging and his housed in a cardboard box. 

Richard Tuttle / Simon Cutts | Loophole

Richard Tuttle / Simon Cutts 

Loophole

London, UK: Victoria Miro Gallery & Coracle Press, 1987

49.5 x 35.5 cm.

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

Loophole is a collaboration between artist Richard Tuttle and poet Simon Cutts. 

Housed in a wooden box with a colophon on brown paper are an irregularly folded, sculptural work on paper - featuring a poem by Cutts ("the green calyx of the petals"), printed letterpress in red on recto (and blue spray painting on verso by Tuttle), and a unique gold painted textile construction by Tuttle with wire elements. The raw-edged fabric has been cut and manipulated to form the 'loophole' - it is attached to Cutts's poem print with two staples. A smaller cut paper collage featuring a pink and green flower has been sandwiched between the two. 

The work is signed and numbered by both artists. 

Simon Cutts | Quelques Pianos

Simon Cutts
Quelques Pianos
Kendall, UK: Jargon Society, 1976
[24] pp., 16 x 21 cm., staple-bound
Edition size unknown

Fifteen short poems on the theme of pianos, with references to Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, etc.

"The book's power was to throw the reader's mind into relief with each reading. One looked and saw clearly; each moment being like the instant when a difficult problem suddenly resolves itself"

-William Oxley

Available here, for $15.00.

Simon Cutts Piano Stool Footnotes

Simon Cutts
Piano Stool Footnotes
Winston-Salem, USA: The Jargon Society, 1982
224 pp., 15.4 x 13 cm., softcover
Edition of 1000 [fifty of which are signed and numbered]


Cutts' first collection of concrete poetry for The Jargon Society, the independent press founded by poet Jonathan Williams, which has been called "a paradoxical fusion of fine printing and samizdat diffusion."

Simon Cutts | Poinsettia

Simon Cutts
Poinsettia 
London, UK: Coracle Press, 1975
16 x 15 cm.
Edition of 36 signed and numbered copies

A white square cardboard box with the single-word title in green in the lower right hand corner of its lid. Inside a thin wooden frame on which two cash tags - the type used for sewing children's names into school clothing - are suspended from coloured thread (red and green, the colour of poinsettias). The tags read "My favourite flowers‌ are leaves".

Jeremy Cooper | The Postcard is a Public Work of Art

Jeremy Cooper
The Postcard is a Public Work of Art
London, UK: X Marks the Bökship, 2014
Edition of 300 numbered copies


Increasingly becoming the world's leading expert on artists' postcards, Jeremy Cooper (whose 2012 book Artists' Postcards: 
A Compendium can be viewed here) compiled and catalogued this collection of sixty postcards by contemporary artists. The book serves as a catalogue to the exhibition of the same name, which ran at X Marks the Bökship, from the 23rd of January to the 1st March, 2014. The title ‘The Postcard is a Public Work of Art’ is taken from a 1996 postcard designed by Simon Cutts and printed by David Bellingham.

The bulk of the reproduced cards were made for the exhibition, which includes work by Bellingham, Cutts, Ruth Claxton, Daniel Eatock, Ruth Ewan and Dan Griffiths, Ryan Gander, Susan Hiller, Georgie Hopton, Sara MacKillop, Elizabeth Magill, Imi Maufe, Hansjörg Mayer, Elizabeth McAlpine, Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Jonathan Monk, Molly Rooke, Colin Sackett, Sarah Staton, Holly Stevenson, Peter Sylveire, Erica Van Horn, and many others.

An interview with Cooper can be viewed at Postcardese, here.

Simon Cutts | A History of the Airfields of Lincolnshire

Simon Cutts

A History of the Airfields of Lincolnshire 

Norfolk, UK: Coracle Press, 1990

32 pp., 18 x 11 cm., paperback

Edition of 100

The text consists entirely of the word "poppies" repeated in a single horizontal line at the foot of each page. 

Simon Cutts

A History of the Airfields of Lincolnshire II

Tipperary, Ireland: Coracle Press, 2000

32 pp.,  17.5 x 11.5 cm., paperback

Edition 300 unsigned and unnumbered copies. 

A sky blue covers and typed green flax fields of Lincolnshire.

These books are an attempt by Cutts to use the vehicle of the book itself as the metaphor for the poem and the situation it describes or equivalences.

Simon Cutts | Beyond Reading

Simon Cutts
Beyond Reading
London, UK: Coracle Press/workfortheeyetodo, [1993]
16 pp., 22 x 15.2 cm., staple-bound


The tenth Little Critic Pamphlet opens with a quote Stéphane Mallarmé from his 1895 essay Crise de Vers:

"The pure work implies the elocutory disappearance of the poet, who abandons the initiative to words mobilized by the shock of their inequality; they light one another up with mutual reflections like a virtual trail of fire upon precious stones, replacing the breathing perceptible in the old lyrical blast of the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase."

followed by Cutts' text (a line per page):

The unit of the work cannot be the sentence

or the phrase

or the line

the linear syntax structure causes

the line

the phrase

the sentence

to be systematic, sequential

the unit of the work is the

word


and lastly, a section called Notes, in which Cutts expands on the above:

"The work is its own continuous accumulative impression, varying and differing not only for each reader, but each time it is read. For this continuous structure to be effective, it must to be the antithesis of a sequential reading…to have read the work in sequence is only one of several possibilities, as the supposed sequence exists in a condition of simultaneity."

Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn | After Brancusi

Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn
After Brancusi
Tipperary, Ireland : Coracle, 2010
[6] pp., 11 x 9 cm, offset

A 5-panel concertina in an acetate wallet, which folds out to continue from the title ..."All sculpture is furniture and all furniture is sculpture".