/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19323514]

Picrel is from late Soviet Union and sign on store says BOOKS. Difference between America and rest of the world.

[Anonymous No.19323533]

[Anonymous No.19323537]

>>19323514
So your proof is one random pic.

[Anonymous No.19323594]

>>19323537
Not that much of a difference.
Good books came across very rarely, and to buy books by the same Maurice Druon had to literally fight.
My father took books for one day, and he read them in literally a few hours.
But these were literally popular books at that time, because the books were in libraries. When I even went to the school library at the age of 10, I found such diamonds that even my father was surprised, although he literally fought for books.

[Anonymous No.19323711]

>>19323514
Yes, when there were no vidya, youtube, netflix and the television ran propaganda 80% of the time, people read more.

[Anonymous No.19323722]

>>19323514
Yeah, but go to Russia today and you'll see the same malaise that exists in America.

[Anonymous No.19323731]

>>19323514
>Picrel is from late Soviet Union and sign on store says BREAD. Difference between America and rest of the world.

[Anonymous No.19324406]

>>19323514
They're lining up for thrilling conclusion to popular Soviet children book series Harry Pottervitch and the Hallows of Death.

[Anonymous No.19325845]

>>19324406
>*Garry Pottervich
lurk moar

[Anonymous No.19326019]

>>19323514
>sign on store says BOOKS
Thanks Shitlock. How long did it take you to figure that one out?

[Anonymous No.19326022]

>>19323711
Yes but they read mainly newspapers and yellow papers, not books

[Anonymous No.19326036]

>>19323537
no, ussr was unironically very well-read. most halfway popular books had print runs in the millions routinely. books even had the price pre-printed on the back to avoid markup fraud. picrel is my faux leather hardcover of Flaubert, priced 1.80₽, with the average paycheck of ~200₽ at the time

also samizdat ran big and you had a lot of people fervently reading basement printed booklets of forbidden texts

[Anonymous No.19326040]

>>19326036
forgot le pic
>>19323594 this anon mayve been from a shithole city or exaggerating it. newly printed awaited books were sold out in no time and some titles were in deficit like most other things, people did borrow (for a couple of days usually though) but there weren't literal breadline tier fights

[Anonymous No.19326041]

>>19326022
Kek a lot of books were originally printed in newspapers weekly.

[Anonymous No.19326587]

>>19323514
> late Soviet Union
You can tell by fashions and decorative style it is not. It's '50s or '60s, if in a smaller town. The zest was that Soviet Union did not print a lot of books people would want to read (outside of mass-reproduced classics), and they had to subscribe for the specific book series in advance (that option was only available to certain classes), collect lots of paper for recycling to receive special points (often a prerequisite for subscription for books), travel to provincial regions to hunt for rare books sent there by central planning, or spend money on a black market.

I did not use image search intentionally.

[Anonymous No.19326632]

>>19326036
some of my soviet books also have the prices written either inside or outside

[Anonymous No.19326638]

>>19326040
Prices were printed not only in books, but on almost every possible product, from television sets to table spoons and post cards. Since there were no private enterprise, it was indeed done to fight the black market. That made buying gift to someone somewhat inconvenient, lol

[Anonymous No.19326657]

What's up my kniggas?

[Anonymous No.19326692]

>>19326040
Books were relatively cheap too, almost everybody could afford to have a personal library.

[Anonymous No.19326748]

>>19323514
Books were dirt cheap back then in USSR so people were buying them but majority haven't read most of them

[S10241875 No.19326763]

>>19323514
I can't write anything original, but still.
The Soviet Union was, in principle, a country of queues. If a Soviet person saw a queue: he immediately took a place in it, and then he already found out what was actually on the other end.
Circulations (the number of printed copies is still written in all Russian books) of many books in the USSR were simply gigantic. Hundreds of thousands of copies, now we can only dream of this.
After Stalin's death (I will not say this about the period before), many interesting books were published. I just started reading the Soviet edition of Theophrastus' work.
But really, I talked to my parents, in the bookstores, somehow there were often no books of interest to them. Why is a mystery to me. Interesting books had to be "taken out", something could be obtained by subscribing through the editorial offices of magazines, some books could be bought only if you hand over old newspapers for recycling (you collected, say, 100 kg of old newspapers and gave them to a paper collection point and could buy interesting book) and other methods. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, there were private second-hand booksellers who, semi-legally, could get rare and old books from the times of the Empire.

[Anonymous No.19326770]

>>19326763
this.

[Anonymous No.19326788]

New bestseller just arrived, yo!

[Anonymous No.19326817]

>>19323514
Yes, the USSR fostered a strong literary culture and encouraged a well-read population. It was one of the successes and a surprising amount of russians are well read.

[Anonymous No.19326831]

>>19326763
There is no mystery. Most books those times were establishment appoven authors that had some propagandistic value, like Maxim Gorki, Nikolai Ostrovsky, collected "works" of Brezhnev etc, so when something "controversial" came in, it was immediately in very high demand.

[Anonymous No.19326843]

>>19326831
That's ironic, because per-revolutionary Russia was one of the most illiterate countries in Europe, apart from upper classes, peasantry and rising working class were totally uneducated.

[Anonymous No.19326857]

>>19326817
Sorry, wrong address.

[Anonymous No.19326872]

In my Warsaw pact country (I guess it was the same in USSR and the others) sometimes they sold the popular books as a pack with political books (usually shit from the party leaders that nobody read).

[Anonymous No.19326918]

>lib.ru

[Anonymous No.19326935]

>>19326763
based poster. a rare glimpse of quality

[Anonymous No.19326952]

>>19326638
> Since there were no private enterprise, it was indeed done to fight the black market.
No, prices were simply centrally calculated in accordance with ever-growing reference tables that supposedly included everything from materials to the delivery cab driver's salary. In socialist countries, money were supposed to be a technical mean to conveniently implement “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, not something that matters by itself. The market was not open, and money were semi-virtual. It was impossible to convert rubles into any other currency, and it was often impossible to buy a different product if the one you needed was not available.

No one would personally sell you a good book for the factory-printed price, they went for 5× or 10× that (which could be the quarter or the half of your monthly salary). On the other hand, no one would buy a collection of mass-printed Brezhnev war memoirs and other such books for any price, if there had existed such a giant idiot to try selling them.

15+ years prison terms were intended to fight the black market, but only in cases where officials (most often participating in behind the scenes “luxuries” redistribution) decided to pay attention. It is sometimes said that the Gorbachev reforms were the outcome of 10 or 15 years of accumulation of wealth by black market dealers, criminals, and high-ranked officials, because they simply could not spend the money on anything. The most expensive thing someone could buy was a car, but they were not readily available, were distributed between various waiting lists, and the buyer (or proxy buyer, like some retired exemplary factory worker) would need some connections in order to skip the explanations about the source of the money.

[Anonymous No.19326962]

>>19323514
Nigger, people were staying in queues because books were as rare and priceless as food or decent clothes.

[Anonymous No.19326996]

>>19326962
lmao
much was suppressed/censored, the printing and paper quality was bad, but rare?! they could literally feast on books. SU, GDR and Japan had the highest per capita number of printed books during 20th century. GDR consequently even memed itself as "Leseland", country of reading.

[Anonymous No.19327028]

>>19326817
still are, it's not uncommon to see russian truck drivers with a paperback open on the their steering wheel while they drive

[Anonymous No.19327067]

>>19323514
So the lack of creativity extended to naming of book stores.

[Anonymous No.19327078]

>>19323514
If you mirror it vertically, it says KHNLN.
If you do the same to BOOKS, it says BOOKS.
Just goes to show, we have more in common than you think!

[S10241875 No.19327082]

>>19326831
Yes, I'm not talking about something "controversial", only about books published in circulation of hundreds of thousands of copies and loved by the people, but for some reason there were few of them on store shelves. Well, I don't know, like Jules Verne and Jane Austen.
It seems to me that huge parts of the issues were simply donated in library repositories and some kind of warehouses. Now second-hand booksellers sell many old Soviet books, which seem to have never been read, but lay somewhere in storage.

And yes, I forgot to say, some other books could be obtained through the "labor union
" (profsoyuz, ) at work or something like that. My grandfather worked at the Ministry of Energy and built a decent library (well, not a professor's type, of course). I do not know how, he just brought books from work, it seems there could be ordered somehow. I borrowed from him great editions of Plutarch. I also took Solzhenitsin from him later.

[Anonymous No.19327117]

>>19327078

[Anonymous No.19327439]

>>19327067
All stores, actually.

What was the point in naming baker's shops if all of them were state-owned, and all of them generally had (or didn't have, as the joke goes), say, the same four types of bread from the same factories? “Bakery. Confectionery. Café”, it's pretty simple.

Western people, just as most young people in post-Soviet countries, can't even imagine the absolute minimum selection of goods in Soviet stores, and that not all societies are by default consumer-oriented.

[Anonymous No.19327543]

>>19327067
There was no need for marketing tricks, since state controlled everything. They even named grocery stores by the numbers.

[Anonymous No.19327564]

>>19327439
>>19327543
Sounds dystopian