Soviet-era Design Books
I love the book SED: Stunning Eastern Design and its miniature half-clone DDR Design, and now I’ve discovered a newer, bigger book on DDR (East German) design, called DDR Design (unrelated to the other DDR Design above), by Günter Höhne (English-language info here). It’s in German only, but lots of large color pictures make it a great piece of extant design porn nonetheless. In the same series as DDR Design, but by different authors are DDR Kochbuch (DDR Cookbook), DDR Backbuch (DDR Baking Book), and DDR Getränkebuch (DDR Drink Book). They’re in German only, and more text-heavy, but design freaks, and English-speakers who care to translate recipes to attain some weak sense of Ostalgia might still get from them some enjoyment.
The particular circumstances of the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany) meant little focus on marketing and little attention on design. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, some of this design began to be recognized. The show Design in der DDR in Stuttgart in 1988 was perhaps the first recognition of extant design. Taschen puts out two books (with nearly the same content) of some of these Wall-era products: the smaller but newer 