Sunday, June 30, 2013

Christmas cards / part one / Robert Enever Associates

These delightful Christmas cards were a yearly treat from Robert Enever Associates (originally started in the mid-fifties by Valerie Hiller & Marjorie Swatton ) who had a photographic studio near the Embankment.  
    Bob Enever was one of those brilliant studio photographers who could be told what was wanted (especially if it was a detailed still-life) and then left to get on with it...he always delivered, too.  Their Christmas cards were printed on photo paper and folded in half, the front always had a simple yuletide tableau which turned to be anything but when you looked at the back of the card.  
    I think the first card was from the early sixties and the last, the only time I saw a colored one, was from the late eighties when the studio moved out of central London.
































Christmas cards part two is in the December 2014 archive



Friday, June 21, 2013

Lenin book / 1987


On a short visit to Moscow in 1987 I couldn't find anything to buy of interest to a designer apart from a pleasant paperback (in English) about the Moscow metro, a slim landscape book of maps of the USSR's rail routes (with, no doubt, hopelessly inaccurate maps as was the style back then) several sets of badges and this really lovely graphic book about Lenin.    
     136 pages, 11.75 by 8.5 inches, black and red (the last ten spreads are all red) and an intermittent use of page numbers. The book's jacket is slightly different from the book's cover. I assume the illustrations are created by scraper board, a technique that is largely forgotten now but the technique works a treat in these pages.
     I wouldn't have expected a State publishing house to put out such a wonderfully designed book but here it is. Most of the pages are text but I've posted a selection of the graphic ones.
     If any Past Print fans know Russian I would like a translation of the title...thanks.