“Also a Book”

1990. A few months before the release of the first book.

“Who’s who? Who is stronger?” Creative tandem with the designer Sergey Veretennikov. 1991 г.

The Author’s first humorous bestseller “Also a Book” (“Tozhe Kniga”) was published in 1991 by a small private publisher, who risked printing a book with a huge circulation of 200 thousand copies, which was quite unusual for this genre. The print was distributed throughout the country, as well as abroad for Russian-speaking readers, and was sold out completely. In the 90s, copies and printouts were made from “Also a Book”, and even semi-pirated editions were produced. Due to continued demand for this book, a limited edition reprint was additionally printed in 2018.

In this book, Andrey Knyshev, along with the book’s designer Sergey Veretennikov, first used a peculiar way of layout and presentation of his “knyshutki” (“Knyshev’s-jokes”), aphorisms, parodies and other author’s satirical and humorous miniatures (“Fables”, “Horns and Hooves”, “Explanatory Dictionary”, “PhraseBook for Dating”, “School Test”, “Useful Tips”, “Philosophical ditties” and many others). By playing with fonts, scales, titles, author’s and editor’s “corrections”, blank pages, collages, and creating a sense of ease and possibility of reading the book from any line, its unpredictability and non-necessity, the Author makes it clear to the reader that these are “accidentally snatched” pages of the writer’s “uncombed” notebooks, or, as he himself puts it, “not crossed out”. Hence the ironic name: “Also (to me) a Book.” The book has a logical structure and a table of contents: “Childhood”, “Youth”, “My Universities”, “Maturity” and … again “Childhood”.

It is the Author’s most cited book.

The book also contains Knyshev’s jokes and miniatures that were heard in various years in the popular Author’s TV program “Funny Guys” (1980-1992); some of them were written specifically for this program, but were not included in it for censorship reasons, or were a kind of “accompanying material” of the Author’s television work.

Some texts from this and other books by A. Knyshev were recommended as additional literature for the school curriculum, some are used in special scientific, philological and popular science literature as examples of language games, quibbling, sharp, capacious and paradoxical forms of word creation.

In 1998, Andrey Knyshev was awarded the “Golden Ostap” prize for achievements in humor and satire as the “Best Humorist Writer”.

Interesting facts:

This book was published in 1991 in India in one of the printing offices of the “Novosti Press Agency” (APN) on paper intended for Gorbachev’s book “Perestroika: New Thinking” and other ideological and propaganda literature of the perestroika period.

The “School Test” was written by the Author in 1983 for an Amateur small-circulation newspaper “We are young”, published in one of the scientific research institutes when the school reform was widely discussed, and parodied the possible absurd form of exam tickets long before the introduction of such methods in modern school education.

Read

____________________________________________________________________________

AUTHOR’S ENGLISH “KNYSHUTKI” AND APHORISMS

* Silence is golden. Don’t spend it foolishly.

* Life is so short. You won’t suffer long.

* It’s OK to take a few steps backward, if it helps you get a running start.

* “Once upon a time a smart young man married a rich old lady. And when he died, she inherited all his fortune”.

* The Soviet Union was an impregnable fortress under siege – from within.

* The world is speeding into the future at 120 calamities per hour.

* Don’t be in a hurry to get to hell. They won’t start without you.

* Crime-minister.

* Some day I would like to found a “Pun American” company.

* When you look at yourself in a dirty puddle, don’t be surprised by what you see.

* Unfortunately, I have just one little vice. But I compensate for it with lots of big ones.

* “The greatest recognition will come to the author posthumorously”.

* I’m not in love with myself. Just infatuated.

Все права защищены и перезащищены.