A bit sloppy around the edges, but it's just a draft. What I like about this design is that, by aggregating the images, it emphasizes their seriality (appropriate to the manuscript) and gives them a flash-card quality. Fixes/Changes: the back cover would continue the motif using different images drawn from the same source; probably I would take out the Russian text and rearrange each image to fill the resulting white space.
The second possibility draws on the same pool of images, but to more "worked" and much more dynamic effect:
I really like the prominence of the song-bird and the way the Yiddish text has been sketched up in this version. Taken together, in my view, the watercolor style of the bird and the facsimile of handicraft in the lettering create an impression of age that stands in powerful contrast with the more contemporary flat, giddy play of the halftone dots -- a theme in the manuscript, with its language of reminiscence and the "old-fashionable." On a simpler note, I also like the open, breezy feel of this one. Notice that a few of the dots are more intensely colored toward the left-hand side of the image: most likely I would continue this drift into bright color across the back cover, adding a dimension of movement to the whole. I might also include the cherries and/or another illustration from the primer on the back cover.
