The Transsibérien is representative of a period of innovative book production in the avant-garde milieu of 1913 Paris, where it was produced. The unusually formatted book was a collaboration between poet Blaise Cendrars and artist Sonia Delaunay. Sonia Terk was formally trained as an artist in Russia and arrived in Paris in 1905. She married Robert Delaunay in 1910, and together they were artist exemplars of Orphism, their work infusing Cubism with dynamic light and color. Through the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Sonia met Blaise Cendrars, who was well known for poetry that involved passages of great emotional force and dynamic imagery. The poem, a tale of a railway journey on the Trans-Siberian Express in 1905, is printed on four joined sheets folded once vertically and twenty-one times horizontally to fit into a small wrapper. Fully unfolded it is over six feet in length. Delaunay's images were reproduced for the edition by pochoir, a process in which color is applied by hand using prescribed brush strokes on precisely registered stencils with consistent color matching. Although intended as an edition of 150, it is likely that only about half that many were produced.

Karin Breuer