Collections of an Only Child: Seventy Years a Bibliophile, the Library of Justin G. Schiller

(Russia), 1936. Lebedev's original manuscript sketchbook for a children's toy, or moveable, book. Oblong 8vo. Illustrated title-page in black ink (titled "Kniga-Igrushka Kniga Raskladushka", translates to "toy-book folding-book"); illustrated sub-title leaf in black ink, in bold playful lettering (Raskas Menja!, translates to "Tell me a Story!"); 19 oblong cards with approximately 40 black and white ink illustrations, mounted to rectos of sketchbook leaves, some heightened in white gouache; with two additional loose ink and white gouache drawings on wove paper inserted in front pocket. Original tan linen-covered boards, with illustrated cover label, in ink; illustrated label in ink on rear board; some gutters starting; scattered light soiling to sheets; some scattered glue residue from when mounted; creasing to cards.

A delightful original sketchbook by Russian avant-garde artist and pioneering children's book illustrator, Vladimir Lebedev (1891-1967). Containing nearly 40 original ink drawings by him, it was created for a seemingly unpublished children's toy, or moveable, book. These drawings depict a variety of children's toys and animals, from pull toy horses, donkeys, rabbits, cats, and ducks, to stuffed bears, musical instruments, wooden cars and trains, jump rope, a plunger, and more. Composed in bold and simplified line work, Lebedev arranges these objects on the page in a variety of juxtapositions that results in a charmingly rich--and at times playfully subversive--visual language that is ripe for repeated viewing. Lebedev's clever compositions and line work are suggestive of the objects moveable qualities and imbue the images with the perspective of a child playing with them. This viewpoint is reflected in a statement Lebedev made about his work for children's books, in 1933: "An artist working on a children's book must be able to access that feeling of excitement that he experienced in childhood. When I work on a book for children, I try to recall the perception of the world that I had as a child".

Lebedev was both a distinguished graphic artist and painter, and is regarded as the preeminent Soviet designer of children's books in the 1920s-30s. Born in St. Petersburg, he drew from an early age and later studied at both the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts and in the private studio of Soviet painter and art educator, Mikhail Bernshtein. Influenced by European and Russian avant-garde art, such as Cubism, Constructivism, and Suprematism, he adapted these styles in a distinctively unique fashion, imbuing them with elements of Russian Folk Art. In the 1920s he became affiliated with the ROSTA windows, a series of boldly designed Soviet propaganda posters, noted for their modern aesthetic. This work, for which he was one of the group's most prolific (he contributed about 600 posters), laid the aesthetic groundwork for his foray into children's book design, which had emerged in Soviet Russia as a focal point for socialist education. In 1922, he published two of his most acclaimed children's books, The Elephant's Child (Slonenok) and The Adventures of Scarecrow (Prikliucheniia Chuch-lo). This followed in 1924 with his and Samuil Marshak's taking control of the Leningrad division of the new Children's Literature Department of the State Publishing House, where they collaborated over the 1920s, developing cutting edge children's book design, as well as mentoring future generation of artists.

By the 1930s, the political atmosphere in the USSR began to change, and Lebedev's work was attacked for not following Soviet ideology of Socialist Realism. In 1936, the year this sketchbook is dated, "an article in Pravda described his art as a 'macabre and ugly fantasy' while another article in Detskaia literatura in the same year also singled him out: 'Instead of concrete images of realistically rendered distinguished workers of the Soviet Union, Lebedev depicts schematic lifeless mannequins' (Fairytales and the Five-Year Plan, University of Washington Libraries). It is possible to see in some of the more satirically-tinged images within this work, Lebedev's own negotiation of these criticisms.

A unique and unpublished work from this master of modern children's book design.