The Russian Museum has a rich collection of commercial posters that entered the museum in the 1920s and 30s from varied sources: the Institute of Proletariat Art, the Kuindzhi Society, the press of the St. Petersburg Tobacco Trust, and the collection of the poster artist Dmitrii Bulanin, one of the cofounders of the Leningrad Advertising Bureau (1926), which was responsible for the distribution of ads and signs in the city. The authors have selected famous images and obscure ones, which together give a sense of the aesthetic range of graphic art in the last years of imperial Russia and the first years of the Soviet era. The book recounts the development of the Russian poster as influenced by the artists' and public's interest in Russian history, tradition, and folk art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Idealized national-historical images proved well suited for the demands of the poster genre. Russian beauties and legendary knights, clad in sumptuous dresses and armor, were used to advertise galoshes, sewing machines, and cigarettes. Probably at the time artists were primarily concerned about decorativeness, about the aesthetic effect that was supposed to draw attention to the poster and, consequently, the advertised object. This practice led to occasional borrowing of subject and form from serious art, which tended to demean the moral message and spiritual value of the original (imagine, for example, Repin's Volga Boatman advertising cigarette wrappers or the Swan Princess advertising powder). As a very democratic kind of art, Russian commerical and industrial posters reflected the evolution of consumers' tastes and artistic searchings from kitsch to works of stylistic perfection. An enthralling publication with humorous subjects and strong imagery throughout. -- Summary written by John W. Emerich, Bronze Horseman Literary Agency.