Search Results: Authors starting with V from Bookvica

Tbilisi: Samkhedro stamba, 1923. 139, [4] pp. 22.5x15.5 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Restored and slightly soiled, blank lower corners of p. 41-44 lost, some pale water stains and small tears, otherwise very good and clean. First edition. One of 1000 copies. A very rare collaboration between two esteemed representatives of Georgian art, Iona Vakeli (1900-1988) and Irakli Gamrekeli. This book is probably one of the only examples by Gamrekeli of a series of abstract drawings for a book of poetry. The main motifs are the industrial city, pictured in chaotic lines and odd angles combined with dancing signboards. The work anticipates the design for H2SO4. Interestingly Gamrekeli used the poor quality of paper available at the time to the advantage of his sharp black & white images. Published in 1923, "Sharavandedi" marked a major breakthrough in the career of the Georgian proletarian poet and playwright, Iona Vakeli. Still only twenty-three years old, the Tbilisi State University student had been… Read More

Moscow: Izd-vo Akad. nauk SSSR, 1938. 96 pp.: ill. 16,3x12,5 cm. In original illustrated publisher's wrappers. Couple of pale small stains on the wrappers, otherwise in very good condition. Previous owner's stamp and inventory number on the title page. Scarce. Third edition. First and second editions published in 1927 and 1932 respectively. Compared to the first edition, this third edition features additional information on the Sun. The study of lighting techniques by one of the greatest Soviet physicians Sergey Vavilov (1891-1951). Three years after this edition was published, Sergey Vavilov's brother, a prominent Russian and Soviet agronomist Nikolay Vavilov (1887-1943) was sentenced to death for receiving criticism from Trofim Lysenko, whose anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with Joseph Stalin. Although his sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, he died in prison in 1943. The book came out as a part of the series Akademiya nauk stakhanovtsam [i.e. Academy of… Read More

Leningrad: Onkologich. in-t, 1932. 75 pp., 22 pp. of ill. 23.2x15.8 cm. In original publisher's brown cloth. Slightly rubbed at the edges. Otherwise near fine. Scarce. First edition. An interesting Soviet edition dedicated to the gastric cancer surgery. Written by the Privatdozent and the employee of the Cancer Institute Alexander Vereshchinsky (1894-) in 1932, this book represents an atlas and explanatory text to the technique of resection of the pyloric part of the stomach in gastric cancer. The edition is the extended version of the article 1119 sluchayev raka zheludka [i.e. 1119 Cases of Stomach Cancer] written by Vereshchinsky and published in the magazine Vestnik khirurgii [i.e. Surgery Herald] in 1929. The great interest shown by readers to the article prompted the author to publish an extended version of the text. The present work provides a systematic description, illustrated with a large number of black and white drawings (47), of individual stages of gastric resections in the form in… Read More

Berlin: Academia, 1923. 48 pp. 25x18 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Front flyleaf and half-title detached from the text block, minor tears of oversized covers and ink note on the inner side, otherwise very good condition.  First and only edition. Rare. Cover design (vignette is duplicated to the title page) and four ornamental compositions were produced by Alexandr Arnshtam (1880-1969), the Russian graphic artist and the early professional cinema designer. In pre-revolutionary period Arnshtam was well-known as a creator of book and stage designs. In 1919 he was arrested and imprisoned, and soon after he was released, he emigrated to Berlin. There he continued to contribute to the 20th-century book design and turned to cinematography. This is a collection of statements on the theatre as the separate kind of art, sophisticated and unique. Its author, poet Samuil Vermel' was Meyerhold's student who worked together with him but denied the Bolsheviks rule and emigrated. Occasionally the… Read More

Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1927. IV, 80 pp.: ill. 23x15,5 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Bumped edges of oversized covers, small tear of the spine and a few spots on front cover, otherwise a very good and clean copy. First and only Russian edition. One of 3000 copies. Cover design in black and brown paint was produced by a constructivist artist Nikolai Sedel'nikov (1905-1994). VKhUTEMAS graduate, he is mostly known as a master of type design and photomontage compositions. His design was reproduced by V. Kalabushkin. Since he typeset all elements of both covers, they look like components from different dimensions. This is one of a few handbooks on printing that was published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. At that time, typesetting practice lacked relevant handbooks and manuals, the craft was mostly promoted by skilled workers. The book was translated and revised by L.A. Tumerman. As he mentioned in the foreword, "Classic typesetting guides by Bauer and Kolomnin are out of print… Read More

Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe nauchno-tekhnicheskoe izdatel'stvo, 1931. 56 pp.: ill. 20x13,5 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Spine rubbed with minor fragments lost, pencil marks and underlinings occasionally, otherwise very good. First and only edition. Very rare. Dneprostroi meant the construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, one of the giants of the Soviet industrializations and the pride of the first five-year plan. It was a "powerful and unruly river harnessed and taken in service to the proletariat". Since 1925, the Soviet Union has released a lot of books praising this project on different stages. Among them are 'Tragic Night' designed by S. Telingater, 'Water Giant' designed by S. Obolenskii, photobooks with similar titles 'Dneprostroi', 'Dniprobud', 'Dneprostroi and the New Zaporizhzhia' designed by N. Mishchenko, G. Epifanov, M. Kirnarsky, et al., various children's books, including four editions of Marshak's poems 'War with the Dnieper River', excursion guides and numerous… Read More

Peterburg: Knizhny ugol, 1923. 87, [1] pp. 23x16 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Very good. General wear of the wrappers with slightly chipped spine and extremities. First edition. One of 2000 copies. Rare. This is a first part of only two dedicated to bibliography of books in Russian on subject of art. This part was dedicated to art theory with 285 titles divided into two big sections: general art theory (general aesthetics, art and nature beauty, art and social life, art and education, and other) and general theory of fine arts. The main index is accompanied by alphabetical authors' index. Each entry includes author, title, imprint, size and number of pages, sometimes price and table of contents. Oscar Vol'tsenburg (1886-1971) was a Russian and Soviet bibliographer, librarian, art critic and teacher. From the very beginning of his activity in National Library, Vol'tsenburg combined theoretical and practical aspects of library work, the main thing in it was the creation of the theory and… Read More

Moscow: Iurist, 2000. 368 pp. 21,2х14 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Rubbed, otherwise very good. One of 5000 copies. Rare. The book was a part of "Pinkerton Investigator Series". It was released for practicing lawyers, prosecutors, judges, as well as students and professors of criminal law. The manual contains three sections: "History of Development of Russian Legislation on Professional Misconduct", "Malfeasances in Contemporary Criminal Law", "Malfeasances in Foreign Legal Systems". The author, professor Boris Volzhenkin (1937-2008) was a Russian legal scholar and criminologist. He graduated from the juridical department of the Leningrad State University in 1960. In 1963-1966, he served as prosecutor in Leningrad. Until 1996, he worked at the Institute for Advanced Training of Prosecutors and Investigators, holding different positions. In 1991, he defended his doctoral dissertation "Secret Abuse of Office: Embezzlement, Abuse of Office, Bribery". He is the author of about 200 scientific… Read More

Almaty: [Tip. MVD KazSSR], 1971. 102 pp. 26x18,5 cm. In original printed wrappers. Few stains on covers, otherwise mint. First edition typewritten and then reproduced on a rotator. One of 3000 copies. A dictionary for criminal slang that includes more than 3000 words and expressions. This variety of Russian language is limited by relation to crime, yet it develops, as other languages, including new components, discarding archaic ones and changing some definitions because of the environment. According to the foreword, a word "vasor" emerged in 1937 meaning "danger, alertness, attention". However, it began to be defined as "empty space, hopeless business" by 1970. The concept of danger later shifted into the expression "liver daviat" and words "atas" and "strem". In creating jargon words, the compiler highlights criminals from Povolzhye and Odessa, who are followed by people born in Kharkiv, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Tashkent and Almaty. Besides general slang, some occupational varieties exist. Thus, a… Read More

St. Petersburg: Nash svet, 1914. 86 pp.: ill. 24x17 cm. Original illustrated wrappers showing the eagle over the mountains: the metaphor of Russian Empire spreading its influence across the region. Minimal restoration of the spine, otherwise very good and clean. First edition. The work by the young historian and geographer Vladimir Platonovich Voshchinin (1882-1965), who would later in life become the founder of the Geographical Research Institute in Murmansk. The book was an attempt to summarize the experience of 'the only real Russian colony' (author). Voshchinin took a trip down in 1913 and observed the ethnographical, economical and political situation in the region. In 1910 he visited the Far East where he did the research on the frontiersmen (described in the book 'Na Sibirskom prostore' [i.e. On the Siberian Vastness, 1912]). As a result the book is a courageous analysis of the situation in Turkestan, author is not afraid to criticize the official government policy of not letting new… Read More

Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1947. 87 pp.: ill. In original publisher's printed wrappers. Covers and spine partly detached from block, some rusty stains on back cover, minor tear of spine, otherwise very good. Scarce. First edition. One of the first Soviet works on the typographic production of newspaper headlines written by the leading Soviet theoretician of book production. Written by Boris Vyazemskiy in 1947, this book represents one of the first Soviet attempts at shedding light on the typographic production of newspaper headlines. The edition consists of five sections: newspaper headlines, lettering, its measurement and elements, font, font difference in style, and headline design. In the first chapter of the book, the author concentrates on the newspaper headlines and 'hats' and underlines the importance of the correlation of the two with the content of the material. The following sections focus on typographic means of headline design and methods of their marking. From the typographic systems of… Read More

Moscow; Leningrad: GIZ, 1934. XXXVI, 324 pp., 1 ill. (front). 23x15 cm. Original publisher's cloth. Frontispiece portrait of the author. Bumped and slightly rubbed, some soiling of the covers, minor tear of the title page, otherwise very good and clean internally. One of 10,000 copies. Rare. Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) was an outstanding Soviet psychologist, neurolinguist, and ingenious experimenter. This monograph was the final result of his lifetime work - he died before the book was published. The work was widely considered an important step in understanding the psychology of speech. In this book, Vygotsky described the experiments he conducted with children's social behavior, arguing that a lot of social functions have a genetic rather than adscititious nature. This later gave roots to social constructivism. The book was first published in English in the USA in 1962. In the 1970s, Vygotsky's theories were adopted by American psychologists when creating new paradigms in developmental and… Read More

Moscow: Sovetskoe zakonodatel'stvo, 1932. 104 pp. 14,5х11 cm. In original wrappers with letterpress design on front cover and two photos on back cover. Covers rubbed, with creases, small tears and creases of p. 25-28, otherwise very good. First edition. Extremely rare. Revolutionary legality meant the necessity to comply with the law in terms of revolutionary needs. The end justifies the means. According to this, the Soviet authorities had a right to extrajudicial executions in 1917-1953. This book was written by Soviet official, lawyer and diplomat Andrei Vyshinskii (1883-1954). It is impossible to separate his name from the Red Terror. He was a professor of the MSU (Department of Criminal Procedure) and simultaneously acted as a public prosecutor in political trials; was one of key figures in regards to mass executions in the 1920s-1930s. He was a member of the secret commission of the Politburo that approved all death sentences in the USSR in 1935-1939. In particular, he headed an important… Read More

Leningrad: GIZMESTPROM, 1938. 18 pp. 22x15 cm. Original illustrated wrappers and illustrations by A.N. Viktorova. Restoration of the spine. The first and only edition. A coloring book. On every turn of the page there's an image in color and the same image and outline of the same image opposite for child to color. The first page is colored, the rest are unfilled. GIZMESTPROM is translated as 'The state publishing house for light industry'. It was mostly printing technical literature, manuals and instructions. Presumably it only published a handful of children's books. The theme of the book is that the animals are getting to the well-known All-Union Agricultural Exhibition which opened in 1939 to show the unusually big vegetables they grew. Not in the WorldCat.