Pro Eto: Ei I Mne. [About This: To Her and To Me].By Vladimir Mayakovsky 44 pp.Illustrated with 8 photmontages by Rodchenko.8vo., 230 x 155 mm, bound in original wrappers designed by Rodchenko, in a new cloth folding box.Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo, 1923.
The rare first edition of Mayakovsky's poem with Rodchenko's famous photomontage cover of Lily Brik. One of the most important and sought-after constructivist books.Although the edition was 3000 copies, as with most Russian books from this period, very few would seem to have survived.
Parr calls it "one of the first, and certainly the finest, examples of the Constructivist marriage between typography and photomontage in its first phase- before it became exclusiveky propagandist in tenor.It is also one of the best examples in photobook history of a union that is rather more difficult to bring off successfully-that between photography and text."
Early ownership inscription on the title-page in purple ink.Covers with professional restoration, some faint marginal damp staining, and light foxing to one image, however, in unusually good condition for a book that is famously always found in terrible condition, rare thus.
Rowell & Wye 505.Parr/Badger I, 91.The Avant Garde in Russia: New Perspectives 305.
