According to the Legal Deposit Law, each Latvian publisher is obliged to deliver several copies of its printed works to the National Library of Latvia. This requirement applies not only to books but also to other publications, including magazines. Sometimes you may find something quite unusual among the copies sent.
For example, the literary magazine “Третья модернизация” (Third Modernisation) was published in Riga in the 1980s and 1990s. Among its issues are several copies made in the technique of scrapbooking. For the covers, the artist used newspaper and magazine cut-outs, candy wrappers, product labels, matches, and other materials. Each of these magazines is a unique exhibit.
Magazine «Третья Модернизация», Issue No. 7 (1988)
Photo: Kristians Luhaers
One of the issues features a polythene bag with the ashes of a burnt manuscript – a reference to the quote “manuscripts don’t burn” by the Russian classic Mikhail Bulgakov.
Magazine «Третья Модернизация», Issue No. 10 (1989)
Two copies of this edition have never made it into the collection of the National Library of Latvia because one of them is a box, and the other is fourteen stones (in the strictest sense of the word). Here is what the editor of the magazine, Aleksandrs Serzants (Aleksandrs Seržants), has to say about them:
“Issue 13 was a box one metre wide and two metres long. In this box I put the unprinted texts of “Третья модернизация” and put a note saying that anyone who wanted to take off their shoes should climb into the box, take the texts, and read them. And if they want, they can write their own poems, their own stories right there – here are the pens, here is the paper. At the beginning, the pile of texts in the box was 10 to 15 centimetres high. But throughout the exhibition, I saw people sitting there. Stirring, bustling. At the end of the exhibition, the box was almost half full. It was like a creative laboratory in a box.
But for the last one – issue No. 14 – I chose large boulders in the quarry. Fourteen stones – issue number fourteen. We carved a fragment of a sentence on each stone... If we collected them all, it would be like a confession of one man. We placed these stones in the parks of Riga. Also at the Riga Cathedral. In this way, “Tretya Modernizatsiya” became fossilized, set in stone. We didn't think of it as a full stop but as an action. Time passed, five years, six years, and – there were no more stones in the city centre. But in the suburbs, for example, in the small Lermontov square, there is still a stone. There is also one in Mezaparks, near the zoo.”
More about this unusual publication can be found on the Periodicals website and in Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze Latvijai, Issue No. 43 (2018, 1 March).
Keywords
Note