Summer Garden Editions ~ New York
(Mikhail Magaril)

Diary of a Madman
By Nikolai Gogol.
Designed and bound by Mikhail Magaril.
1998. Edition of 100.

Gogol's account of a poor but noble clerk, who believes he is the missing King of Spain, and of his subsequent imprisonment in a madhouse. A sad, funny story about one man's search for a better world in eighteenth-century St. Petersburg, at the time the bureaucratic center of all of Europe. Originally salvaged from a burnt manuscript, Gogol's tale is less well-known in America than those by Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, or Chekhov, but is as important to Russian literature as their studies of madness. Gogol's Diary is magnificently interpreted by Magaril's drawings. Magaril sought to reproduce the story to resemble a real document. Handwritten chapter headings which demonstrate the protagonists decline, an authentic hospital tag, and natural linen brought with the artist when he emigrated to the United States add to Gogol's intimate portrait of madness.

Recipient of a Carl Hertzog Book Design Award citation as a runner up, given by the Friends of the University Library of the University of Texas at El Paso. Exceptional.
$800