The other day I found an interesting piece singing praises of the Norwegian system of book publishing and circulation. The central point it makes is that, using its hydrocarbon windfall, the Norwegian state automatically buys 1000 copies of any book above a certain quality standard, published in Norwegian, then re-routes it to a national library allocation system, to public libraries country-wide. That is on top of each local library's own, separate acquisition budget. 1000 copies, for a society of 5 million people. This is a wonderful system, according to the author, as it secures demand for publishers, including small ones, and assures that authors will actually see some income from the product of their labor. One copy securely published per at least 5000 citizens.
Hungary is a nice comparison. Its population is just under 10 million, i.e., double the size of Norway's (and falling, another story). But my point will be not about current Hungary.
Sometime in the mid 1980s, Hungarian publishers stopped indicating the numbers of copies in the books. But until then, they had. So, a couple of items, just off my shelves, result of a 3-minute random research (ok, not completely random as I was lazy to bring in the ladder, so these are just books I could reach by stretching my hands), as examples.
Read it as a very quick and perforce superficial peek into what at least one aspect socialist publishing--the one relevant to the point about the Norwegian system--looked like, once a given work passed editorial muster for quality and political acceptability. (A little more about the latter, later.)
I happen to have the 1961 edition of the collected poems of one of the great Hungarian poets of the 20th century.
Two-volume collected poems from an early 20th century poet, published in 54,000 copies. In a country of 10 million, that is, a copy for every 185 citizens.
But Ady, after all, is one of the literary legends of Hungary. Let's see some foreigners.
Staying with poetry, Bengali Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore's poem cycles The Crescent Moon and The Gardener were published in a slim little volume in 1979.
Early 20th century Bengali poetry, in Magyar translation, published in 1979, in 10,000 copies, one book per 1000 citizens.
Let's raise the stakes here.
A six-volume edition of Shakespeare's Collected Works:
. . . was published in 1961, in 35,000 copies. Have I mentioned it was six volumes? One set per 285 citizens.
It is easy to counter that all that was "just politics." So, let's see how north American prose--i.e., "high culture" from the Cold War adversary, fared.
I happen to own a copy of a volume titled Contemporary American Narrators, from 1965. In case you are curious what authors were considered contemporary American prose in 1965, here's the table of contents:
This volume came out--if you listen to the "totalitarianism" rhetoric of the Cold war, narratives of the "enemy"--came out in 24000 copies. One copy for 416 citizens.
And, not to beat the point to death, one final piece of empirical factoid. A truly popular, anti-systemic attitude novel, "a cornerstone of American prose", Joseph Heller's Catch-22, published in English in 1961, was released in Hungarian translation in 1977. . .
. . . in 135,000 copies. . . One copy per 74 citizens.
I wonder how many copies the greatest works by Hungarian (or, for that matter, any other non-US) authors were published, say, between 1960-1989, the height of the Cold War, to educate / enlighten US readers about the complexities of life on "the other side." To anyone interested, I am happy to provide a list of names.
More to the point for today: I would like to invite today's Hungarian publishers to release the true and honest numbers of the copies in which they publish their wares.
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