Industriya Sotsializma (The Industry of Socialism)
Moscow: IZOGIZ State Publishing House for Fine Arts, 1935. First edition. Softcovers. Folio. Produced for the "Seventh Congress of Soviets" in February 1935. Six separately bound and stitched books and one portfolio numbered "7" housed in an elaborate cloth slipcase with metal bars attached to cover and spine, two stiff full size inside plates, including a glossy title page printed in red and gray, verso with portrait photograph of Lenin, facing page with Stalin, both with descriptive text printed beneath; a red cloth vertical half-page flap containing debossed title. The portfolio binding rubbed, with light wear along edges and some plane staining of back cover. Books with light wear and rubbing. Portfolio No. 7 laid in with some wear along inside flap, chips and creasing
Three variations compare to Heiting (indicated by [ ]) below:
1. The New Face of the USSR, 18 leaves, including inserts, 42pp.
2. The Bolsheviks Have Awakened the Natural Riches of the Country, 88 leaves, including inserts.
3. Machine-Building [88] 44 leaves, including inserts.
4. Forward and Higher, 24 leaves, including insert.
5. The Peasant in a Tractor, the USSR in a Car, [24pp.] 24 leaves, including insets (One double page loose).
6. These are Real-Life People..., 44 leaves, including inserts.
7. The Heavy Industry of the USSR. 2 maps (rare and usually lacking) but here present. However lacking the 40 page manual of descriptive text on the factories.
Includes gravure plates, fold-outs, gatefolds, accordion folds, collages, and cutouts. Printed to variant paper types; seven separately bound books in wraps, numbered 1 to 6, with variant cover photographs and embossed designs, and a folder labeled "7" with two fold-out maps laid in. Photo-illustrated canvas slipcase.
"... a monument of late Lissitzky over-the-top typographical and book design, leaving no flap unturned. Printing photographs of blast furnaces, factories, and machines in various colors on a panoply of papers... Lissitzky is often thought of as a bridge between Soviet and Western European avant-gardes, but here in his last decade he became another kind of bridge, revealing the absolute interchangeability of Bolshevik propaganda and early twenty-first century American product advertising." (Roth; The Book of 101 Books).
"The Industry of Socialism is above all a significant piece of creative labour expounded in the most expressive language of photographic art... It was constructed in an exceptionally short period... Each chapter of the album is a separate chapter snatched directly from our living reality..." (Yury Rzhevsky, "1,349 Poems. The Industry of Socialism," in Sovetskoye Foto No. 5, 1935).
"The Industry of Socialism was published as a set of magazines: it not only looks like USSR in Construction (SSSR na stroike) but also echoes it thematically and includes a large portion of photographs that had already been published. Leading Soviet photographers contributed to the album; their names are given at the end of the book. Some of the photographs are signed. Besides the magazine's look, the album employs many techniques from the documentary . Indeed "The Industry of Socialism is a series, a collection of documentary films. The kinship of the photographic eye and the cinematic eye is obvious here." (Mikhail Karasik, The Soviet Photobook 1920-1941, p. 215).
Text in Russian. Binding rubbed along edges and staining to back cover and on top of inside pocket. First inside plate with number inked to top foredge corner and rubbed. Covers of no. 1 rubbed, No. 2 with light creasing and rubbed. Nos. 3,4,5 and 6 lightly rubbed, two of them with four inches sunned along foredge. Portfolio #7 with maps, has some wear, small chips along edges and inside flap with closed tears and lower half detached from center plate. Good- to very good condition. Item #54728
Price: $17,500.00