Bobrov, Sergei. Archimedes' Summer, or The Story of the Fellowship of Young Mathematicians (Arkhimedovo leto). Book One. First edition. Designed by Yuri Kiselev, 1959. In Russian.

Бобров, Сергей Павлович. Архимедово лето, или История содружества юных математиков. Книга первая / оформление Ю. Киселева ; научный редактор профессор И. Н. Веселовский ; рисунки, чертежи и схемы в тексте И. Архипова, Л. Катаева, Ю. Киселева, М. Лохмановой, Ю. Молоканова, И. Маликовой, И. Найденовой, Т. Прокудиной. Первое издание.
Москва : Государственное издательство детской литературы Министерства просвещения РСФСР, 1959. 391 страница, иллюстрации, чертежи и схемы в тексте ; 22 см.
Твердый переплет. Тираж 30 000 экземпляров. 
Переплет и блок - хорошее состояние: блок крепкий, бумага равномерно пожелтевшая, текст полный.
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Bobrov, Sergei Pavlovich. Archimedes' Summer, or The Story of the Fellowship of Young Mathematicians. Book One / designed by Yuri Kiselev ; scientific editor Professor I. N. Veselovsky ; drawings, diagrams and figures in the text by I. Arkhipov, L. Kataev, Yu. Kiselev, M. Lokhmanova, Yu. Molokanov, I. Malikova, I. Naidenova, T. Prokudina. First edition.
Moscow : State Publishing House of Children's Literature of the RSFSR Ministry of Education (Detgiz), 1959. 391 pp., with illustrations, diagrams and figures throughout ; 22 cm.
Hardcover. Print run of 30,000 copies. 
Binding and text block good: block firm, leaves evenly toned, text complete.

The first edition of the opening volume of Sergei Pavlovich Bobrov's celebrated narrative introduction to mathematics, and one of the most distinctive productions of the Soviet popular-science book of the Thaw years. Bobrov (1889-1971) came to this work by an extraordinary route: a founding figure of the Russian literary avant-garde, he organised the group Lirika and then, in 1914, the Futurist association Tsentrifuga together with Boris Pasternak and Nikolai Aseev, publishing verse, criticism and pioneering statistical studies of Russian versification. In the 1920s he turned to social-utopian fiction, and in the early 1930s he was arrested and exiled to Kokchetav. After his return he devoted himself to translation and to mathematics for young readers, producing Volshebnyi dvurog in 1949 and this larger sequence a decade later. Archimedes' Summer is built as a novel rather than a textbook: two schoolboys, Lyova and Vovka, spend a summer with an elderly mathematician, and the mathematics arrives through argument, digression and joke. The first volume covers unicursal figures, labyrinths, the geometry of paths and knots, polyhedra, mathematical riddles, the fifteen-puzzle and perfect numbers, and includes a full-page reproduction of Dürer's Melencolia I in the discussion of magic squares. The scientific editor was Ivan Veselovsky, the leading Soviet historian of ancient mathematics and translator of Archimedes and Copernicus, which accounts for the unusual historical precision of the text. Yuri Kiselev's jacket design, with its chequered field, silhouetted tree, chess knight and scattered numerals, is a characteristic and much-admired example of late 1950s Soviet graphic modernism. The volume appeals simultaneously to collectors of Russian avant-garde authors, of Soviet book design, and of recreational mathematics.