Label No. 2241 — Bench 6, Tuesday Afternoon
Pull up the stool. Volodin sent the cover proofs over from the press room twenty minutes ago and I want a second pair of eyes before I sign off on it. The figure works at this size — I redrew the stick three times until the silhouette held against the crimson — and the registration's clean, only a hair of mint shift on the right edge that I can live with. But the slogan is what I want you on.
Komendantov approved it Tuesday last. Three weeks of marginalia and one twelve-minute meeting and he wrote soglasen across the top of the breakdown in that green pencil he keeps. I won't pretend I wasn't holding my breath. He'd been pushing for something flatter, more declarative — you know the register — and I kept coming back with this. Seven words. It had to be seven, to fit the rectangle without crowding the figure, and I couldn't stand to lose one of them.
So before you read it — solve it. Lev started doing this with every slogan through the studio last spring. He calls it reading it the long way. Says you only know if a phrase has weight when you have to lift it letter by letter. I think he's right. Every letter is swapped consistently with another. Click any letter on the label face to light up its cousins; then tap what you think it stands for. The frequency tally beside it is yours to use. Get four right and I'll slide the cover off the tray — the slogan is set on the inside, plain, with Volodin's colophon for the run.
OUR WINTER BEGINS
There — that's the way Volodin's press will run it tonight. Four hundred and eighty-two thousand pockets across the northern oblasts by the end of the month, each one struck off the same plates. I keep thinking about the boy in Kargopol who'll get one in his coat from the corner kiosk in December and never know it was a Tuesday in October when I finally got the kerning on BENDS to stop fighting me. That's the work, though. Thirty-seven by fifty-three, and you put what you can in it. Thank you for reading it the long way.