Book jackets are a wellspring of graphic styles and often mirror what is going on in the design culture. I’ve long admired this pastiche of Russian constructivism for the book The Diary of a Communist Undergraduate from 1929. The author Nikolai Ognev (1888-1938) was active as a writer “before the October Revolution,” which, we’re told, he embraced enthusiastically. Ognev wrote a lot about the radical changes in education in the Soviet Union in the twenties, especially the int
