A New Popular Science Book Of The 1920s: About What and How?

Abstract

Existing researches on early Soviet books focus on illustrated books. This
article, however, attempts to build a more diverse view of the children’s
book of the 1920s, drawing on a corpus of 142 complete texts of various
orientations. In the first part of the article, all the texts in the sample are
grouped by subject and characterized. The predominant place is occupied by the so-called production book in the broadest sense: devoted not only to production processes, but technology, technologies, and resources. It turns out that the “resource approach” is characteristic not only for production books, but also for books about animals or human health. The second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of artistic methods used in popular science texts and the analysis of innovative methods in the design and illustration of books.

Keywords: popular science literature, non-fiction, book illustration, picture book, constructivist book