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8: Cienfuegos Press, Part III

May 31, 2010

Here’s the last installment of the Cienfuegos/Costantini covers. Bits and pieces. This Tifft cover is one of the best in my opinion, the graphic is crisp and commanding, and the type treatment is clean and stays out of the way. (Too bad the book itself is almost unreadable!). Also here is one of Costantini’s first covers for Cienfuegos, for Alexander Berkman’s Russian Tragedy. Great book and stunning cover, the corpse of a Kronstadt soldier says it all. The Wilhelmshaven Revolt is another cover attributed to Jean Pierre Ducret, but has many of the hallmarks of Costantini, including the thick black outlines, folds in the clothing, and extra detail in the faces.
 


 
This pair of Mexican Revolution covers are both definitely Costantini’s work. The Zapata cover is one of my least favorite of the entire run of covers he designed, while the Magon cover is one of my favorites.
 


 
These two are later covers, both co-published by, and I would guess designed/typeset by, Soil of Liberty Press in Minneapolis. The deCleyre pamphlet uses a nice duotone of Costantini’s Haymarket painting, and the simple tall sans serif type sets it off, very clean. The German Guerilla cover uses the same clean type to set off the horrifying photo of RAF member Holger Meins’ corpse, displayed after he died from a hunger strike in prison.
 


 
The third and six (and last) issues of the Anarchist Review. Neither cover is attributed. The illustration of the woman on #3 is pretty weird and awful, but the creepy priest and cop in the background are strange enough to be interesting.
 


 
Bibliography:
Stuart Christie, ed., Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review #3. Sanday: Cienfuegos Press, 1977.
Stuart Christie, ed., Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review #6. Sanday: Cienfuegos Press, 1982.
Voltairaine de Cleyre, et al., The First Mayday. Sanday: Cienfuegos Press, 1980.
Ricardo Flores Magón, Land and Liberty. Sanday: Cienfuegos Press, 1977.
Icarus, The Wilhelmshaven Revolt. Yorks: Simian Press, 1975
Hans Joachim Klein, et al., The German Guerilla: Terror, Reaction, and Resistance. Sanday: Cienfuegos and Minneapolis: Soil of Liberty, 1981.
Peter Newell, Zapata of Mexico. Sanday: Cienfuegos Press, 1979.
Larry Tifft & Dennis Sullivan, The Struggle to Be Human. Sanday: Cienfuegos Press, 1980.

Subjects
AnarchismSocial Movements

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