The art of book covers of poetry collections from Bulgaria 1900 – 1939 and Macedonia in the decade or so after the establishment of the republic in 1944 are ephemeral windows into the development of modernist graphic art in the Balkans. Various currents of modernism continued to develop and intersect in Bulgaria not only in Sofia, the capital, but also in the smaller towns, right up to the outbreak of WW2. After the war, a striking feature of the first modern Macedonian political entity was that graphic art was allowed degrees of abstractness and personal expression absent from the socialist realist canon. As a whole, the article invites a reconsideration and reanalysis of the place of the modern in Balkan – and thus European – art history.