Sapozhnik-velikan: leningradskaia fabrika Skorokhod [The cobbler giant: the Skorokhod factory in Leningrad] by Trizna, Ol'ga; designer unattributed

Moscow-Leningrad: Gos. Uch.-ped. Izd-vo, 1931. Octavo (19.5 × 13.8 cm). Original photo-illustrated wrappers; 72 pp. About very good. Intended for Soviet school-age children, this "production book" was published at the height of first Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) when the Soviet state undertook major industrial reforms. The author makes a case for mass production of shoes, focusing on the "Skorokhod" shoe factory in Leningrad. The "dwarf workshop" is pitted against the "factory giant" as the reader is taken through the entire process of shoe production from manufacture of materials, to the factory floor along with 10,000 workers, and on to the distribution of the finished product all over the Soviet Union. The final chapter tells the story of Iakov Kalinin, a former worker at the "Skorokhod" factory killed during the Russian civil war. In 1922 the factory was renamed "I. A. Kalinin" in his honor. Children's "production books" such as this one, describing in detail the construction of factories, production of consumer goods and extraction of natural resources, were modeled on the "production novel," a genre popularized for adults in the Soviet Union during the first Five-Year Plan. Production literature was to communicate excitement about the massive undertaking of rapid industrialization to the Soviet citizens. Highlighting a single heroic worker, in this case Iakov Kalinin, was also typical of the genre. Little is known about the author, Olga Borisovna Trizna (1898-1939), who published several popular production books for adults and children in the early 1930s, with titles such as "The Fight for Bread"; "Silk"; "Rayon: production of artificial fiber" among others. The designer of the striking photomontage cover design is unattributed. As of October 2019, KVK and OCLC only show the copy at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.