ABSTRACT
The Soviet government has called into being titanic apparatuses to convey book-learning to the masses. The biggest of these organisations is the "Gosizdat", the State Publishing Agency. This bureaucratic colossus of the publishing world has, on the plea of "rationalisation", extended its tentacles ever more widely, until it has come to make itself responsible for 50 per cent of the book production of Soviet Russia. Recently Chalatoff, chairman of the Gosizdat, has stated that the social and economic proportion of the total book production of the organisation ranges from 40 to 50 per cent. The great majority of Russians in all strata of the population prefers to read belles-lettres rather than propagandist literature, and also prefers belles-lettres to the instructive works which come next after the political in the aggregate of the book production of the Soviet realm. Book production and distribution in Soviet Russia are, in fact, profoundly disorganised—although not disorganised from the outlook of the Bolshevik Party.
