Book print runs in the USSR according to the 1939 collection “Pechat Strany Sotsializma”

The 1939 volume "The Press of the Land of Socialism" offers valuable data on the state of the publishing industry in the USSR. For example, it gives a comparative breakdown of book output and the print runs of books issued in particular fields and by particular authors.

If the printing of fiction grew sevenfold between 1913 and 1937, almost as much as agricultural literature, technical literature grew twenty-seven-fold.

The volume of Pushkin's editions is compared across two twenty-year periods: from 1897 to 1916, 9 million copies were published, and from 1917 to 1938, 28 million copies. Saltykov-Shchedrin rose from 0.7 to 5.6, Nekrasov from 0.2 to 7.7, Chekhov from 0.5 to 14.4, Tolstoy from 9 to 18.3. Darwin rose from 0.9 to 2.3, and Hegel.

Interestingly, a separate spread is devoted to statistics on the editions of Stalin. They begin in 1917 and run by five-year plans, rising from 200 thousand to 6 million over the first 6 years, to 77 million over the next 5 years, and to 158 million by 1938. One could read and never finish!