Kivikas, Albert.

[ESTONIAN FUTURIST BOOK – PRINTED ON BEER BREWERY LABELS] Lendavad sead [The flying pigs].

Tartu: self-published, 1919. Octavo (22.5 × 15 cm). Original staple-stitched wrappers featuring black letter-press typography over unused labels from a Tsarist-era brewing company; 22 pp. of text, printed to blank rectos of unused brewery labels; all in all, this copy contains samples of seven different labels. Spine extremities frayed and split along lower half; one page with cut; still a good copy of a book typically encountered in various states of completeness. Item #P6338

Rare copy of the most iconic avant-garde book to emerge from the young Estonian republic, which was printed on the versos of unused beer labels from a Tsarist-era Tartu brewery (some labels are in Russian, though most in German). The labels were assembled randomly, and as a result each of the few documented copies differs both in terms of the wrapper design and versos of the text pages. Kivikas’ prose poems are divided into two sections, “Singing Fish” and “Iron Sirens,” and dwell on modern phenomena such as electricity, the cinema, and revolution (the final prose poem is entitled “Revolutsioon”). They clearly show his avant-garde orientation and, in particular, the influence of Futurism in their focus on technology and a desire to violate bourgeois notions of literary writing, which was the proclaimed goal of the present collection of texts. “This is Futurism at its most authentic, striding above all in the foot-steps of Russian Cubo-Futurism. [...] [Kivikas’] texts are replete with modern technology and momentum, but his central device involves absurd metaphors with a surrealistic effect (‘clarinet-frogs’, ‘pitch-milk’ etc.) and metamorphoses of creatures reminiscent of circus and silent film tricks.” See “Geometrical Man” (Tallinn: KUMU, 2012), pp. 74–76.

As of January 2024, KVK, OCLC show two copies worldwide, with none held in North America.

Price: €3,000.00

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