Steel!

If you follow this blog, you may have noticed that we are a bit nutty over early Soviet book design. Their modernist aesthetic combined with a celebration of the proletariat and the wonders of the machine age are so over the top they can't help but grab your attention. You add in a dose of hindsight (uh, that "utopia" was kind of a sham, and, well, there is Stalin...) and the unreality steeped in hyper realism strikes a cord of awe.

One of our latest additions is a brag book about the Soviet steel industry. Kachestvennai︠a︡ stalʹ SSSR (Moscow, 1935) makes its point immediately. It is bound in two sheets of high-quality steel engraved with the title. You open it up, and there, silhouetted with another sheet of steel between two cut sheets of paper, is Stalin admiring an info-graphic showing the impressive growth of steel production between 1927-1934.

You have to see it to believe it. Come in and ask for Rare Z246 .T45 1935.