The hunt for Erica Van Horn’s Seven Lady Saintes has been long, but at last, in a glass case in Conway Hall at the Small Publishers Fair in London this year, there it was. Van Horn and Simon Cutts (co-founders of Coracle Press) have been a regular feature of the Small Publishers Fair since its first occurrence in 2002 at Royal Festival Hall.

Conway Hall, owned by the charity Conway Hall Ethical Society, first opened in 1929 and is named after Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907), an anti-slavery advocate and biographer of Thomas Paine. It has hosted the Fair since its second outing in 2003. In 2025, it had a cameo appearance in the spy drama series Slow Horses as the unlikely host for an ultra-right mayoral candidate’s campaign event. The setting provided the kind of sardonic humorous dig that Van Horn would appreciate (if she were a regular television viewer).

With stained-glass colors, Seven Lady Saintes splashes its own brand of sardonic humor across a stiff-card leporello produced in 1985 at the Women’s Studio Workshop Print Center in Rosendale, New York.

Seven Lady Saintes (1985)

Seven Lady Saintes (1985)
Erica Van Horn
Clear plastic-coated white-thread envelope, self-covered leporello, watercolor paper. Envelope: H270 x W215 mm. Leporello: H250 x W205 mm (closed), W3040 mm (open). 16 panels, including covers. Edition of 90, artist’s proof. Acquired from the artist 1 November 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Van Horn uses a sophisticated child-like style of text and image to laugh slyly, wryly, and grimly at religion and patriarchy. Her summaries parody the descriptions in the handouts usually available in museums, convents, and churches or in the flood of hagiographies long on the market. The sophisticated-naivete of the drawing in Seven Lady Saintes appears in other works such as La ville aux dames (1983) and With or Without (2010). If the story of her plan for a series of four children’s books had turned out differently from the account in Scraps of an Aborted Collaboration (1994), we would have even more evidence of the influence of children’s books on many artists’ books that the Huberts propose in The Cutting Edge of Reading (1999).

Martha, patron sainte of cooks and housewives

Agatha, patron against fire and diseases of the breast

Fina, patron sainte of San Gemignano

Reparata, formerly patron sainte of Florence

Lucy, patron sainte of Syracuse and diseases of the eye

Ursula, patron sainte of teachers and young girls

Cecilia, patron sainte of music and musicians

Walking the Portes (2025)

Walking the Portes: Winters in Paris 2014-2019 (2025)
Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn
Casebound, book cloth over boards, blind stamped and inked spine, photo pastedown in recess on front cover, plain doublures. H182 x W132 mm. 216 pages. Edition of 300. Acquired from Books about Art, 15 September 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

In the early 2000s, a series of hardbacks appeared called “Writer and the City”. John Banville covered Prague; Peter Carey, Sydney; Justin Cartwright, Oxford; Ruy Castro, Rio de Janeiro; David Leavitt, Florence; and Edmund White, Paris. White’s was the first, and it set the tone with its content and title: The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. An enterprising paperback publisher might be enticed to reissue them and, allowing for a Parisian double-dip, to add Walking the Portes. Besides, I prefer Simon and Erica’s Paris to Edmund White’s, and Walking the Portes pairs better with Anne Moeglin-Delcroix’s Ambulo Ergo Sum (2015) anyway.

It is Simon’s plan to ride out to each of the entrances to Paris (the portes) and walk back to the apartment in the Marais. When it turns out that instead of twenty-one portes there are thirty-nine, Erica firmly responds accordingly:

In introducing Ambulo Ergo Sum, her extended essay on Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, and herman de vries, Moeglin-Delcroix writes:

The analysis of some artists’ books … should make it possible to show how the emphasis has been progressively placed no longer on landscape but on the search for the best means, differing according to the various artists, of rendering an experience in the strongest sense of the word: a lived experience of the world, a personal practice, that is to say, a deliberate way of being inthe world rather than before it. The walking body is the touchstone of this, because walking compels one to supersede the limits of a purely visual experience of nature to become the experience of the whole artist, with his body, in nature. (p. 6)

Whether Walking the Portes is an artists’ book or not, it does what Moeglin-Delcroix describes. It renders these artists’ lived experiences of Paris and their deliberate way of being in the world together.

Kuhl, Nancy. 2010. The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn. Clonmel: Coracle Press. Until the acquisition of Seven Lady Saintes, Nancy Kuhl’s The Book Remembers Everything (2010) was the only means in the Books On Books Collection by which to gain a sense of Van Horn’s more painterly bookworks such as La Ville aux dames (“second state”) (1983), a unique work that appeared in the 1986 Chicago exhibition “The Book Made Art“. Van Horn’s works are archived in the Beinecke Library at Yale University: Prints, Papers, Materials in the Digital Library, and the Simon Cutts Constructed Archive. Several, including Seven Lady Saintes, are viewable online at the Fleet Library Rhode Island School of Design. Accessed 27 November 2025.

Statue of Santa Reparata in the crypt in the Romanesque foundations of Santa Maria Maggiore, Florence. Photo: Books On Books Collection.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Conway Hall

Books On Books Collection – Erica Van Horn (III)

Seven Lady Saintes (1985)

Walking the Portes (2025)

Further Reading