Wladyslaw STREZMIŃSKI

Z Ponad, Poezje. [From Beyond, Poems] By Julian Przybós.  30 pp.  4to., 216 x 190, bound in publisher’s wrappers with a typographic design by Strezmińki.  Poland: Bibljoteki “a.r.,” 1930.

An exceedingly rare masterpiece of Polish Constructivism designed by one of its champions, Wladyslwaw Strezmiński (1893-1952).  The cover is one of Strezmiński’s finest examples with its colourful, playful typographic design.  For Przybós poem, Strezmiński ‘attempted to make type “recite” poetry on the page’ (The Avant-Garde Applied, p. 36), as he plays with various fonts and words oriented vertically or horizontally interdispersed with similarly oriented thick black lines. 

‘The a.r. Group—standing for artyści rewolucyjni (revolutionary artists) or awangarda rzeczywista (real avant-garde)—was founded in 1929 by artists (Katarzyna Kobro, Henryk Stażewski, Strzemiński) and poets (Jan Brzękowski and Julian Przyboś) formerly belonging to the Blok and Praesens groups. This book, a radical visual-textual collaboration, was the first volume of the Bibljoteki “a.r.” (a.r. Library), the group’s publication program.’ (From The Merill C. Berman Collection, mcbcollection.com, ‘Two Iconic Books of the Polish Avant-Garde’.) 

From an approximate edition of 400 copies.  OCLC finds just one copy in the US at the University of Wisconsin and Rare Book Hub fails to find a copy at auction.  Some minor professional repairs to the extremities of the cover, else a near fine copy of this fragile work. 

Andel, 203-205.  The Avant-Garde Applied, p. 36, 230