Once in Paris, he started a small press, "Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux" (New Man Editions) with the help of an anarchist who owned a clandestine printing press at the Mouzaïa Quarter, 19th arrondissement. His first edition, 125 copies of "Les Pâques à New York", was published October 1912. Despite failing to sell a single copy, he pressed ahead with the second book, "La prose du Transsibérien", published June 1913 (see 1913 in poetry). Intended as an edition of 150, only 60 copies were printed, of which about 30 are thought to survive. The book, a series of 4 sheets glued together in an accordion-style binding, measures 199 cm tall when unfolded; the height of all 150 end to end would have equalled the height of the Eiffel Tower, a potent symbol of modernity at the time, and referenced in both the poem and the print. "[The poem] describes the 16-year old poet’s epic, perhaps imaginary, train journey from Moscow to Harbin (in Mongolia) during the Russo-Japanese War and the Russian Revolution of 1905. The route is shown on the contemporary map printed at the top right of the sheet. It is a long, oppressive ride through Russia with apocalyptic scenes of war and revolution, and descriptions of cold, hunger, death and devastation which worsen as the train follows its eastward course and are punctuated by the repeated, melancholy question of Jehanne, the poet's companion, "Dis Blaise, sommes nous bien loin de Montmartre?" (Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?')" Chris Michaelides The book is an early example of the deliberate use of multiple fonts - twelve in all - in different sizes and colours to suggest movement and differing moods, contemporaneous to similar experiments by the Italian futurists. It is also unusual for 'defying the codex form' and for placing the images on an equal footing to the text; they run parallel and complementary to the text, rather than as illustrative or decorative additions. It was through Guillaume Apollinaire, a mutual friend, that Cendrars was to meet Sonia and her husband Robert Delaunay, members of the Parisian avant-garde, leading exponents of cubism, and inventors of the term "Simultaneity". The Delaunays had coined the word from their study of Chevreul's laws of simultaneous contrast.