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[SOUTH OSSETIA] Skazka severnogo lesa [i.e. Tales of the Northern Forest]

Brezhnev, G.

Item #2589

Stalinir (Tskhinvali): Gosizdat Iu.O.A.O., 1942. 28 pp. 16,5 × 12 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Spine and cover edges restored, some foxing on front wrapper and t.p., ink marks on the last text page, ink signature on t.p., otherwise very good and clean.

First and only edition. One of 1000 copies. Very rare.
This wartime children’s book was published in Stalinir, previously Tskhinvali and now the capital of the disputed de facto independent Republic of South Ossetia (the State of Alania), which is internationally considered part of Georgia. Tskhinvali was renamed Stalinir in 1934 and this name remained until the de-Stalinization period. Before 1917, Tskhinvali was known as a transit town with developed trade and a large Jewish diaspora. Under Bolshevik rule, synagogues were destroyed and religious life was suppressed. By the late Soviet decades, the Jewish people made up 1% of the city population. In the 1920s and 1930s, Georgia developed light industry and agriculture, but with the outbreak of WWII, 20 essential factories were evacuated to Georgian territory. The territory didn’t place military actions, but Georgian lands were on the way of petroleum from Baku to the Black Sea. In 1942, the Nazis broke through far to the east in the North Caucasus and reached the Volga. The troops of the Transcaucasian Front and the Black Sea Fleet had to rely mainly on the economic resources of the Transcaucasian republics: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The edition includes one tale in verse, divided into several parts. The design of this wartime cover is unusual. It is illustrated, with the background illustration printed in a color different from the font. The illustration occupies all the space outside of a narrow vertical rectangle left for the title. The typesetter could have set all the text aligned to the center
or the left margin, but instead, a shared letter ‘C’ was placed prominently, with the first-second words set inside it and the third word carelessly offset. Moreover, instead of the conventional order with the city at the top and the year at the bottom, this cover used the reverse order, emphasizing the year of the war. The State Publishing House of South Ossetia was established in 1924. Prior to this, there were no publishing houses or printing shops in this territorial entity, so in the mid-1920s presses were ordered and competent staff were recruited. The first book published at the Tskhinvali printing shop was the “Primer of the Ossetian Language” for elementary grades, with a printrun of 3 500 copies. Only 5 titles were published in 1924, then ten years later, in 1934, the number had risen to 42 titles. For its first decade, the enterprise was directly headed by the People’s Commissar of Education of South Ossetia.

In all, a valuable example of Alanian book designs.

Worldcat doesn’t track this edition.

Price: $650.00