a book for Ecency discord challenge

Once again, a great topic for blogging challenge has been suggested: books. I can't get past it :) especially since all of November this is what I was doing: summing up and my reading and books experience in the year of 2022 (or rather, I summed it up quickly, but writing a detailed post about it proved to be difficult and a long-rolling task).
For more details on Ecency Discord posting topic #49 check here.

"Your favourite book" and "your favorite book to give as a gift" topics of course are good prompts, but it's like a huge forest in which you can wander endlessly; approaching one tree you see it better than the others, and so on.

Other questions are trivial: yes, generally speaking, I prefer paper books to e-books (old editions, in particular!). And yes, I have wanted to write a book for a long time, and still do :) by the way, I not only wrote that book already, but I edited, designed, published and printed it myself, and sell it from my website. It turned out to be a very pretty little blue book (see the pic below).

By the way, I already used this image in my #introduction post. Am I falling into the mortal sin of recycling my stuff for using this (my own) picture again? Oh shit, now I abuse the rewards pool. I might be a bad author then, probably deserving to be kicked off the blockchain... Unlike those good samarians who lend nice free visuals from photobanks in every post and incapable of creating even one such picture themselves. Excuse me for this short lyrical Notabene, adressed to our venerable Hive Police.

This logically brings my story to the point that I am a book designer and books are my job. I am in the know and like to "cook" them :)

OK, let's get back to the books. This year I added 10 paper books to my library (I hope to do a separate post about that). One of them is 'The Tales of Ural mountains' by Pavel Bazhov (you may see it in the picture above).

There is a story behind this book, as there is behind all the others. Will you find it outstandingly interesting? Not sure, but still, it deserves to be told (in a separate post).

Our publishing house launched a series of classics this year, and this is one of the books that came out in the series. (The series includes mainly Russian literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kuprin, Turgenev, Pasternak, Zoshchenko... many glorious names). The 'punch' of the series is that the books are luxuriously illustrated (editions themselves are quite luxurious too... not a fastfood-paperbacks). As a rule the text is accompanied by illustrations which have become "canon" for the given text - or it is just a very convincing original work of art. Bazhov's book is no exception.

The book was first published in 1939, under the title «The Malachite Box». Since then the stories have been republished many times... Their mesmerising poetry has attracted, without exaggeration, hundreds (!) of artists, and of course there are hundreds of different editions... is there really a need for one more? The answer is yes!

We decided to reprint the 1977 edition. How is it remarkable? The illustrations for this edition were drawn by the outstanding, without exaggeration, Russian book artist Boris Diodorov. (The list of the books he has impregnated with wonderful images would not even fit into the longest post). The book was awarded the First Degree Diploma in 1977 at the All-Russian Book Art Competition, for its finest art.

The (1977) edition has become a rarity and has not been reprinted since. Why, you may ask? Shit happens! Boris Diodorov's illustrations (for this book and several others) went to Japan for an exhibition, and there were stolen (sic! or, if you like, here's a milder formulation: "were lost"). Since than, there was simply nothing to re-print... By the time everything existed on paper only (unless it was professionally photographed on purpose. Well, it wasnt). So there are no copies of files for these illustrations, nothing. Of course, there exist a printed edition of the book that can be used... but there are too many "buts" which stand on the way of a publisher.

To put it brief: original drawings on paper, compared to page-sized, rasterised prints, have very sufficient differences in terms of quality. Thats why simply reproducing the book pages would lead to a shitty quality instead of a beauty. That was not an option.

We bought the book on avito (the Russian equivalent of eBay), scanned it on our beautiful Microtic scanner, and then... Between the two books there appeared hundreds of hours of Photoshopping work with my eyes, brain and hands - to the point that some of the pictures were almost redrawn (happily, not from a scratch!). Just almost. The result: the pictures in our book are even better than they look in the 1977 book. (Of course the original is always better than the copy, but the Art of Printing has also levelled up a lot technologically in the last 45 years, it hasn't stood still). The mission is completed, and I must say it is a very noble mission - Diodorov's illustrations of Bazhov's Tales, which have become canonical, have been returned to people again!

Of course, I invested so much effort into this book that I now have the pleasure of looking at it and remembering the labour of my hands. So I bought the book and it now stands on my library shelf. PS. Green is the colour of malachite, a semi-precious mineral, if anyone doesn't know... that's why green was chosen for the design of the book.