75 459 Russian avant garde Dollar Jim = M Shaginyan
- Wr. chipped and restored along edges; vague stamp on backwr.
= Khan-Magomedov p.121 and 125; Compton, Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917-34 p.82, 86 and 157 note 50: "Rodchenko's fascination with film continued to inspire many of his book covers, including a scheme capable of variation for a series of popular detective stories - Mess Mend or the Yankee in Petrograd (...) - written by Marietta Shaginian under the pseudonym Jim Dollar. For all ten volumes Rodchenko devised a complicated geometric layout combining colour with black and white, by dividing the cover into alternating coloured and black fields carrying white lettering. The central areas vary from cover to cover: they include cleverly cut photographs, including close-ups, reflecting the description to be found on the title page of volume one: 'cinematographic novel'. He chose a different colour for each cover and the series, which came out in 1924, remains most effective, though cheaply produced" (p.82).