Limited Editions Club My Sister, Life by Boris Pasternak 17/250 Signed Very Fine

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Offering for sale this incredible First Edition, Limited Edition "My Sister-Life" authored by Boris Pasternak and produced by the highly … Read more Offering for sale this incredible First Edition, Limited Edition "My Sister-Life" authored by Boris Pasternak and produced by the highly esteemed Limited Editions Club of New York in 1991. This is #17 of 250 made and is signed on the colophon by the illustrator, Yuri Kuper, who contributed six (6) magnificent original illustrations plus the front-piece to this incredible book.

Other relevant information includes:

- Very fine elephant size 16" x 19.25" folio [89 pp] bound in half grey Nigerian oasis goatskin boards covered in handmade paper made by cutting Russian newspapers into tiny pieces which were then incorporated with the rags and cotton pulp
- Author's name in Cyrillic embossed in black on the spine
- Fore- and bottom edges uncut
- Endpapers and text pages of the same hand-made paper as that covering the boards
- Six full-page etchings with tissue guards by Yuri Kuper bound in throughout the text
- Housed in a slipcase covered in linen cloth, lined with light grey velveteen (please see images 13 and 14, as one side of the slipcase has some sunning dislocation)
- Includes club newsletter specific to this publication

In its slipcase, the book measures 16.5" wide x 19.75" high x 1.25" thick and weighs 7 pounds 5 ounces.

For those unfamiliar, the Limited Editions Club has been making and publishing select titles in limited edition since George Macy founded it in 1929. Their philosophy and mission has been to produce the finest books in the world, seeking and using the finest and often world-renowned designers, typographers, binders, illustrators (for drawings, wood engravings, and original lithographs and etchings), printers (using letterpress printing, hand-made paper, and imported linens and silks) -- works of art really.

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his novel, "Doctor Zhivago" - it was smuggled out of the USSR and published in Milan in 1957, earning Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. This work, "My Sister - Life", is his first published collection of poems and is considered one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Controversial when it was first published five years after the October Revolution of 1917, the revolutionary spirit pervades the poems - not in the political sense but in the spirit of beginning again.

The artist, Yuri Kuper (b. 1940), has worked in several mediums, and his work for "My Sister - Life" recalls the Russian Constructivists' radical, dynamic, geometric abstractions in his use of strong diagonals and primarily geometric forms. Kuper has exhibited at galleries in Europe and the United States, and his work forms part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts, and the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain in Paris (n. b., above info from Wikipedia and the LEC newsletter). See less