JBbTC 1: Novosti Press Agency
Posted April 12, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I've been really digging designing book covers of late, which has made me look much closer at all the other covers I come across and already have on my shelf. I'm going to try to start doing this weekly blog column (blogumn? is that a term?) sharing cool book covers I find.
For this first installment, I want to share three great covers from a series late-Soviet political books I picked up some years back in Chicago. They are aesthetically amazing, pulling together clean and crisp replicas of different moments of modernist design. And politically, like most late-Soviet material, very strange. It appears that they were produced in 1971 and 72 by the Novosti Press Agency Publishing House in Moscow, primarily to attack Chinese communism, but they are in English, and the text is so dull that they are practically unreadable. I pity the poor Communist Party member that had to read these back in the day. There's definitely no attribution or clue who the designer(s) is, but they were quite graphicly cheeky, with the "white wedge" of reaction cutting through (or infecting?) the red and black circles of Anarchism/Trotskyism/Maoism, and the "falling" Chinese architectural forms of the Peking Divisionists!
Comments
These are really great, love the lettering and the drop on the Leninism cover.
In addition to the covers are there anything interesting about the spines on these?
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These are gorgeous! I'm excited about this series.
Posted by: Icky at April 12, 2010 12:30 PM