Volume 3

About 2 years ago while up in Santa Cruz for a friends wedding I found a very strange book at Urban Outfitters. I'm not sure whether the book's title or the strange front cover caught my eye first, but whatever the case, I picked up the book and after thumbing through just a few pages, decided to buy it. The book was called the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume 2 and to this day its still one of the weirdest and creepiest books I have ever seen. The book is basically filled with tons of R. Crumb-esque pen and ink drawings, that are actually hand drawn replicas of real prisoner's tattoos. Most of these prisoners happened to reside in the worst Prisons and Gulags that the former U.S.S.R. had to offer, so their tattoos reflect their grim situations. Corpses, Satan, Stalin, you name it, they have it tatted on them. Also every tattoo meant something. If you were a facist tattoo X signified it, a murderer then get tattoo Y, an anti Communist then tattoo Z, and so on... Every prisoner was a human piece of hieroglyphics waiting to be deciphered. So yesterday out of the blue while I was reading Black Earth I was wondering about Russian Criminal Tattoos again and I decided to do an Amazon search. Low and behold they had just added Volume 3 of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encylopaedia for pre-order!!! Also Volume 2 has since gone out of print and sells for anywhere from $100 to $700 online! SCORE!!! Needless to say I pre-ordered Volume 3 and will be looking forward to getting it in the mail. Maybe I will even buy a few extra copies to slang in a year or so to finance a purchase of Volume 1, which is even more expensive and harder to find.
Just One Weird Image From The Book