Bernett Penka Rare Books Archives - Rare Book Insider

Bernett Penka Rare Books

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Slate Pencil Drawings for the Self Instruction of Children

Slate Pencil Drawings for the Self Instruction of Children

Canton, R[obert] London: R. Canton, n.d. [ca. 1850]. Duodecimo (16.7 x 10.5 cm). Original glazed pictorial wrapper, front wrapper printed in gold, green, and black and with embossed design; 12 leaves printed on one side only. Some light handling wear and marginal tears along edges, some bumping along spine, rubbing and scuffing to covers, light wear to extremities, prior repair to spine, overall good condition. A sweet little 19th century instructional volume aimed at children. The 12 leaves are lithographed and printed as mostly black backgrounds highlighted with white drawings on them, forming twelve 2-page spreads mimicking a school blackboard. The illustrations range from simple geometric shapes to game boards, birdcages, animals, houses and other building, furniture, fruit, toys, and other items. The illustration to the cover depicts three children sitting quietly, teaching themselves how to draw. At the time of this volume's publication, Robert William Canton (1821-1893) described himself as a lithographic printer and publisher who later moved into the printing and publishing of valentines, bookmarks, conversation cards, and other similar items. In an advertisement from the time, Canton "calls the attention of the Trade to the facilities he possesses for executing first-class Colour Printing, and informs them that he is at all times ready to make Sketches, emblazon Testimonials to Clergymen, Public Servants, and others, on the shortest possible notice. Work of this description can also be executed for working at the Establishments of his Customers with their own imprints; and is a class of work to which he directs his particular attention, and in which he has had a most extensive patronage for a series of years." (The Bookseller, 1862). There is not much additional information on Canton's business or his publications, although he was a participant in the 1862 International Exhibition and continue to print advertisements for his business into the 1880s. A very scarce and delightful volume; as of March 2023, OCLC locates only two holdings in North American libraries and two in Australia.
  • $1,250
  • $1,250
Russkii i germanskii voennyi mir o tvorchestve K. Popova [The Russian and German military world in the writings of K. Popov]

Russkii i germanskii voennyi mir o tvorchestve K. Popova [The Russian and German military world in the writings of K. Popov]

Bulgakov, K. G. Buenos Aires, 1957. Octavo (19.5 × 14.5 cm). Original printed wrappers; 104 pp. Stamp of the Union San Alejandro Newsky, a defunct private diaspora library, on title page, faint outline of a previously attached price sticker on the upper left-hand corner of the wrapper. Some light signs of wear; else very good. Added title in Spanish: Juicio del Mundo Militar Ruso y Alemán sobre los Escritos de K. Popov. Konstantin Sergeevich Popov was a significant military historian and memorialist in the early twentieth century. Despite losing his left hand in combat early on during WWI, Popov continued to serve for a large portion of his life, and wrote prolifically about the Russian war effort from a first-hand perspective. In this book, Popov's regiment general, K. G. Bulgakov, offers his own comments on Popov's writings, which detail the battles undertaken during World War I by his regiment, His Majesty Mikhail Fyodorovich's 13th Yerevan Grenadier Regiment. Reviews of Popov's writings from the era praise the author for his rousing portrayal of the Russian Empire's military prowess; some critics even went so far as to suggest the book as prescribed reading for young men, so that they might familiarise themselves with the Russian Empire's great military history. This edition was published in 1957 by Anton, a Russian-owned publishing house based in Buenos Aires. As of March 2023, KVK, OCLC show four copies in North America.
  • $250
book (2)

Java Danse

Gurvich, Aleksandr and Aleksandr Frolov, artist Moscow; Izdanie avtora, 1926. Folio (35.2 × 26.7 cm). Original decorative wrappers; 3 pp. Name inscribed on cover in pencil: Barbara Palosh; some small tears around edges of front wrapper; remnants of stamp, P R; some light staining to reverse wrapper; stamp on reverse; else very good. The Java was a novel form of the waltz that originated in France during the 1920s. Set to a bouncier beat, Java dance choreography delighted and scandalised in equal measure on account of its close embrace. Java was popularised in the USSR during the relatively liberal NEP years, and would be phased out soon after, when Stalin's regime began to tighten the screws on acceptable forms of music and entertainment. The wrapper for this sheet music features a constructivist design by Aleksander Ivanovich Frolov, whose monogram can be discerned on the front wrapper (identified based on Morozov, Opredelitel' monogramm, 2008). Frolov was one of the 'Magnificent Four' sheet music artists, whose designs were used prolifically in sheet music publication. Artists of sheet music art often laboured in obscurity. Their designs functioned to attract the atttention of listeners and to distinguish the dances. To find sheet music from this time with its original cover is a rarity: covers at the time were often torn off, used for other pieces of music, and ultimately discarded. As of February 2023, OCLC locates only one holding of this title in North America.
  • $350
book (2)

40 wood-cuts: Paulus Augius Augustinavičius, Viktoras Petravičius, Vaclovas Rataiskis-Ratas, Telesforas Valius. Text by Paulius Jurkus

Jurkus, Paulius Augsburg: "Žiburiai," 1946. Folio (35 × 24.7 cm). Original printed boards, quarter cloth binding; [19] pp., 40 leaves of plates. Signed in pencil by Telesforas Valius. Good or better; trace of private library label to lower spine; some scuffing and rubbing to corners and spine extremities; stamps of a non-existing Latvian library in Connecticut. Important work on the vibrant modern Lithuanian graphic arts, which developed from the 1930s onward as a result of the encounter of traditional folk motifs with Western influences, and led to a flowering in the 1940s and 1950s, with many of the prints focused on the trauma of war and exile. "Lithuanian graphics, whose many representatives were studying in Europe, made their way through all the doctrines' letters and have poured in our art a great originality. We find in them the pulsation of the Lithuanian soul having taken a liking to symbolism and mysticism. Our traditions and our inner liking for stylization have led our engravers far from realism" (from the preface). Preface and artist biographies in English, French and Lithuanian. With woodcut prints by Paulius Augius (1909-1960), Viktoras Petravičius, Vaclovas Rataiskis-Ratas, and Telesforas Valius (1914-1977), leading figures of the Lithuanian graphic arts movement, which was revived in Lithuanian camps for Displaced Persons (DP), who had fled their country during WWII. There, various studios were established, an Applied Arts Institute was created in Freiburg by artists from Kaunas, and a series of exhibitions were held. This copy indicates a print run of 425 numbered copies, of which 25 on "offset-paper" and 400 on regular paper (Werkdruckpapier). Other copies state a print run of 300 copies on wove paper. This copy is signed in pencil by Telesforas Valius below the colophon, and with an additional gift inscription to title (dated Freiburg 1948). Valius has also signed all of his woodcut prints in the book. For more information aboutt modern graphic arts in Lithuania and the movement which is commemorated in the present work, see Paulius Jurkus, "The New Lithuanian Graphic Arts" in Lituanus no. 2 (7), June 1956. Scarce in the trade.
  • $750
Literatura v obozie [Literature in the camp]

Literatura v obozie [Literature in the camp]

Borwicz, Michał Kraków: Centralna Å»ydowska Komisja Historyczna przy C.K. Å»ydów Polskich - Oddział w Krakówie, 1946. Octavo (15.5 × 22.5 cm). Original pictorial wrappers by cartoonist and satirist Karol Ferster; 76, [8] pp. Numerous illustrations and decorative initials throughout. Light chipping to spine; evenly discolored; still very good. This collection of essays by Michał Borwicz about life in a concentration camp was published as part of a larger effort for the preservation of memory of the Holocaust by the Central Jewish Historical Committee. The Committee was active in Poland in the years 1944-1947 and was originally involved in collecting the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. The effort was large-scale and several thousands of such responses were collected, which were then organized in annotated editions and published in the immediate after-war period when the memory of the Holocaust was still a topic largely unregulated by the communist government or any political agenda. Michał Borwicz himself worked for the Committee, coming in with a background of a scholar and a writer. His life during the war was marked by turbulence, as he managed to escape the extermination camp in Lviv and was also involved with the underground. In the introductory note by the editors, they present this collection as another step towards telling the full story about life under the Nazi occupation and about the work of the underground resistance movement.
  • $250
Cherez polius v Ameriku. Risunki A. Deineka [Across the Pole to America. Drawings by A. Deineka]

Cherez polius v Ameriku. Risunki A. Deineka [Across the Pole to America. Drawings by A. Deineka]

Baidukov, G[eorgii], Geroi Sovetskogo Soiuza [Hero of the Soviet Union] and Aleksandr Deineka, artist Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo detskoi literatury (Fabrika detskoi knigi), 1938. Octavo (24.5 × 19 cm). Original pictorial card boards with cloth spine; 38, [2] pages. Numerous color illustrations and portraits. Light rubbing to edges and corners; else about very good. Soviet children's book commemorating the world's first successful voyage by plane across the North Pole, from Moscow to Vancouver, which Baidukov (1907-1994) executed together with V. Chkalov and A. Beliakov in June 1937. For an audience of pre-schoolers, Baidukov here recounts the three-day journey from a first person perspective, describing the actions of his colleagues and finally their enthusiastic arrival in the United States and their reception back in Moscow. In 1941, Baidukov would be dispatched to the US by Stalin to discuss the Soviet purchase of American fighter planes with President Roosevelt, shortly after the Soviet Union entered the war in June 1941. Illustrated by Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969), a leading modernist figurative painter. From 1920-1925, Deineka studied at VKhUTEMAS, a hotbed of artistic experimentation in the 1920s. In 1925 he became a founding, and perhaps the most prominent, member of "OST" (Obshchestvo stankistov), or the "Society of Easel Painters", active in Moscow in 1925-1931. The group's objective was to fight against traditional realism, and to move toward "a new, modern realism." OST artists were most interested in contemporary and urban themes, machines, sport, and similar reflections of modernity. The group also positioned itself against abstraction and constructivism, advocating a return to figurative art. Nevertheless, their stylistic origins were precisely in left art in combining multiple perspectives, choosing sharp diagonals, and flattened blocks of color all evident in this book. Contemporary critics called OST artists "formalist realists" and noted influences of German expressionism among others. As of February 2023, KVK and OCLC show four copies in North America.
  • $1,500
  • $1,500
Vyznachni zhinky Ukrainy: Olena Pchilka

Vyznachni zhinky Ukrainy: Olena Pchilka, Staryts’ka-Cherniakhivs’ka [Remarkable women of Ukraine]

DrazhevsÊ ka, Liubov and N. Danylevs'ka [Munich or Canada]: Ob'iednannia ukrains'kykh zhinok na emigratsii, 1950. Octavo (17 × 11.8 cm). Original printed wrappers; 64 pp. Portraits. About very good. First and only volume of this planned series of biographical essays on remarkable female figures of Ukraine's history and cultural life. The book features no publisher's information, but judging from paper and typefaces used, it was most likely published in North America or Canada by various members of the Ukrainian Association of Women in Exile, which was founded in Augsburg in 1945 and existed until 1950, after which many members left Germany and it became the Organization of Ukrainian Women in Germany. The present volume contains essays by Liubov Drazhevs'ka about Olena Pchilka and by N. Danylevs'ka about Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska. Pchilka (1849-1930) was a Ukrainian writer, ethnographer, and civil activist, as well as the mother of Ukraine's most important modern woman writer, Lesya Ukrainka. In addition to her wide activities in publishing, translating from the Russian, documenting Ukrainian folk art, and her own output of poetry, she was also active in the Ukrainian women's movement. Starytska-Cherniakhivska (1868-1941) was a writer and literary critic close to Lesya Ukrainka, who, along with many family members, was ultimately punished for her nationalist leanings during the 1930 Stalinist show trial against the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. While in exile, she was arrested again in 1941 and died en route to exile in Kazakhstan. She had also been a prominent women's right activist, co-founding the National Council of Ukrainian Women in Kamianets-Podilskyi in 1919. Scarce in the trade.
  • $450
Tsekha v puti: ocherki o sorevnovatel'nykh nastroeniiakh [The guild on the road: essays about competitive moods]

Tsekha v puti: ocherki o sorevnovatel’nykh nastroeniiakh [The guild on the road: essays about competitive moods]

Karavaeva, A[nna] Moscow-Gosizdat RSFSR "Moskovskii rabochii", 1930. Octavo (17.5 × 12 cm). Original pictorial wrappers; 155, [5] pp. Good or better; some splitting to spine; front wrapper with creases; text toned; largely uncut and unopened copy. First edition of this volume of essays about the socialist transformation of the well-established Trekhgornaia textile factory in Moscow, by the Russian and Soviet writer Anna Aleksandrovna Karavaeva (1893-1979). Originally from Perm', Karavaeva studied at the Bestuzhev Courses, the leading institution of higher education for women in the Russian Empire. After the Revolution, she returned to Siberia and taught at Barnaul and Ul'ianovsk, before moving to Moscow in 1928, where she began her literary career. Among others, she worked as an editor for the journals "Molodaia gvardiia" and "Sovetskaia zhenshchina" (Soviet Woman). A recent essay notes that "the books written by A. Karavaeva became true witnesses of the life of the country in the 20-60s of the twentieth century. They are a profound insight into the life and spiritual world of the new Soviet man who was building a fundamentally new society, devoid of prejudice, bourgeois philistinism, cowardly servility and obscurantism. A society of creators and creators." The present work, written in a lively style incorporating dialogue and first-hand accounts, is based on the author's own experience shadowing workers at the Trekhgornaia Manufaktura in Moscow during the course of one year. As of February 2023, KVK, OCLC show two copies in North America.
  • $350
Semi tserkvam: poema [To the seven churches: a poem]

Semi tserkvam: poema [To the seven churches: a poem]

Rafalovich, Sergei and Kirill Zdanevich (1892-1969), designer Tiflis (Tbilisi): Iz-vo "Kavkazskii posrednik", 1919. Octavo (18.4 × 12.7 cm). Original staple-stitched pictorial wrappers with a design by Kirill Zdanevich; 15, [1] pp. Small chip to lower right corner; wrappers somewhat toned and fragile; else about very good. Rare volume containing a long poem by Sergei L'vovich Rafalovich (1875-1943), a Russian poet and translator, who lived in Paris after 1909. During the Russian Civil War he also lived in various cities in the Caucasus, including Tbilisi, Baku, and Batumi, and published the journal "Orion" in Tbilisi together with Sergei Gorodetskii. In a contemporary review, Vladimir Nabokov was critical of Rafalovich's choice of metaphors and themes, while conceding occasional moments of genuine poetic talent. The final leaf contains a list of Rafalovich's numerous publications. Wrappers designed by Kirill Zdanevich (1892-1969), painter, book, and set designer and a key figure in avant-garde circles in the Caucasus. After a brief association with Vladimir Tatlin and Liubov Popova, he gravitated towards Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, and was a signatory of the Rayonist Manifesto in 1913. He became known for his experiments with Cubo-Futurism and his interest in primitive art. After being wounded during WWI and settling in Tbilisi, he co-founded the futurist group 41 Degrees (41 Gradus), which also included his brother Il'ia Zdanevich (Ilyazd), Aleksei Kruchenykh, the poet Kara-Darvish and the theater director Igor Terent'ev, and which was active in 1918-1920. Today Zdanevich ranks among the most significant futurist book artists of the time, such as the collection of "ferro-concrete" poems titled 1918. He visited Paris in 1920, but was mostly confined to the Soviet Union, even serving a ten-year GULAG sentence after WWII. The present cover illustration, while partly figurative, is reminiscent of his works for '1918' and demonstrates an interest in the transition from flat surfaces to three-dimensional objects. Signed "K.Z. 1919" to lower left corner. Not in Getty. As of November 2022, KVK, OCLC show only one physical copy in North America.
  • $3,500
  • $3,500
Forel' razbivaet led: stikhi 1925-1929 [The Trout Breaks the Ice

Forel’ razbivaet led: stikhi 1925-1929 [The Trout Breaks the Ice, poems 1925-1929]

Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Pisatelei v Leningrade, 1929. Octavo (17.8 × 13.6 cm). Original pictorial wrappers by V. Khodasevich; 93, [3] pp. Spine and edge of wrappers professionally restored (with some fragments of spine missing); Soviet bookstore stamp inside rear wrapper; very light occasional finger soiling; else still about very good. First edition of what is perhaps the best and most famous volume of poems by the Silver-Age poet and composer Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), whose work was close to the Symbolists and Acmeists. With a striking wrapper design, boldly lettered, by Valentina M. Khodasevich (1894-1970), the Soviet painter, graphic artist, and set designer who studied in Munich and Paris before working in Vladimir Tatlin's studio and participating in a number of important exhibitions, such as "Bubnovyi valet" and "Mir iskusstva." "Kuzmin's fundamental objective was to take epicurean delight in beauty. He set many of his works to music and was closely associated with little theaters and a famous literary cabaret of the day in St. Petersburg called the Stray Dog. His principal subject was love, and he did not conceal his own homosexuality. His masterpiece was a poetic cycle "The Trout Breaks the Ice" about the return of a homosexual lover after an affair with a woman" (The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, p. 424). One of 2000 copies printed. Scarce in the trade.
Jak válčily houby s brouky: ukrajinska pohádka [How the beetles went to war against the mushrooms: a Ukrainian folktale]

Jak válčily houby s brouky: ukrajinska pohádka [How the beetles went to war against the mushrooms: a Ukrainian folktale]

Kyiv-Prague: Péčí Ukrajinského Vydavatelského Družstva "Čas" v Kijevě; Dědictví Komenského (Tiskem Lidové knihtiskárny J. Skalák a spol. v Praze), 1919. Quarto (28.8 × 22.8 cm). Original staple-stitched chromo-lithographed wrappers; 7, [1] pp. of quatrains with accompanying illustrations, of which four pages are in color. Very good; only minor foxing and discoloration to upper and lower spine. Czech translation of a rare Ukrainian children's book, with striking chromolithograph illustrations throughout by Okhrim Sudomora, an artist who worked as an illustrator in Lviv and Kharkiv up through World War II, but about whom little else is known. He also illustrated the book "Fun Work, a Folk Song" (Krakow and L'viv, 1944) and may have been involved with a series of powerful anti-Soviet and anti-Nazi propaganda produced by Ukrainian nationalists in post-war Germany. In 1949, he was arrested for anti-Soviet activities in 1949 and received a twenty-five-year sentence, later living in poverty and obscurity. The present edition was published in Kyiv and printed in Prague, in a translation by Fr. Tichý and with a full-page explanatory postscript addressed to Czechoslovak children, sympathetically explaining the situation of the Ukrainians. The original was also published in 1919. The book is a curious example of a Ukrainian cultural phenomenon: the habit of viewing political upheavals through a mycological fairytale prism. The folktale "War of the Mushrooms", published by Russian ethnographers Vladimir Dal' and Aleksandr Afanas'ev in the nineteenth century, was reinterpreted in 1909 by Heorhii Narbut as an allegory of Ukraine's national predicament vis-a-vis the Russian Empire. The present edition revisits the tale in light of the successful Bolshevik revolution. See: Philip Rogosky, "Fungi and War in Ukraine" (FUNGI Volume 15:4, Fall 2022). Rare; as of January 2023, KVK, OCLC show a single copy at Boston Public Library.
Eolova arfa: stikhi i proza

Eolova arfa: stikhi i proza, kniga pervaia [The Aeolian harp: poems and prose, book one]

Petrograd: Izdanie individual'noe (self-published), 1917. Octavo (25.4 × 15 cm). Original pictorial wrappers; 91, [5] pp. Light fraying to spine extremities; Soviet bookstore stamp inside rear wrapper; else about very good. First book of poems by the author (with the added specification "book one", but all published), which is more conservative in design and content than Tufanov's later publications, but already gestures towards lyrical experimentation on the level of both format and subject matter. In the book's preface, "Tufanov uses the figure of an actor on stage to represent the self-alienation that his generation feels, especially when faced with the horrors of the First World War" (Geoff Cebula, :"Aleksandr Tufanov's Ushkuiniki, Historicist Zaum', and the Creation of OBERIU", SEEJ, 2014). Tufanov (1877-1943) is a still largely neglected Russian futurist writer and theoretician, who owes much to Velimir Khlebnikov's theoretical and poetic attempts to create a transrational poetic language based on abstract sounds rather than established semantic sense. He is perhaps best known for his "Ushkuiniki", an epic poem that strives to create a "historicist" zaum that harkens back to old Russian roots and themes. His "K zaumi"(1924) also contained a manifesto outlining the zaum worldview, the foundations of transrational (zaum) creativity, and a "declaration" signed by Tufanov, who usurped, with a small modification, the title which Khlebnikov gave himself: Charman of the Terrestrial Globe of Zaum. Tufanov was also close to Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedenskii, two main figures of the 1920s avant-garde association OBERIU. Getty 792. As of February 2023, KVK, OCLC show four holdings in North America.