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January 24, 2019 4:06 AM   Subscribe

Mir Publishers was a major publisher in the Soviet Union. The short wikipedia entry is not even clear on its mission. The aim of the publishing house was to translate works of eminent Russian scientist into other languages and distribute them around the world. They were very high quality, cheap and "also published in many Indian languages: Hindi, Marathi and Bengali I know for sure" -- all printed in the Soviet Union. The group blog/portal Mir Books used to collect scans of questionable legality (ironically, mostly sourced from the darker corners of the russian web), but since a while, the English collection is also available on Archive.org. Books range from introduction to the sciences aimed at elementary school students to advanced textbooks, mostly in physics, mathematics, chemistry and engineering.
posted by kmt (6 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
I just missed having to study Russian to pass mechanical engineering. I guess Mir Books and cheap editions from Dover meant that the best textbooks could be in English too. I'd far rather have affordable if rather dry books such as these than the multi-$100 textbooks there are now. But the new books can be taught by part-time staff, while these ones need dedicated faculty.

Leafing through Belyaev, I see many examples cribbed in full as recalled from my 1980s education.
posted by scruss at 5:28 AM on January 24, 2019 [4 favorites]


I love the illustrations in Going to Kindergarten!
posted by ITheCosmos at 8:02 AM on January 24, 2019


I was a big Mir fan when I was studying physics - the Soviet Union was already gone by then, so they weren't easy to find but some were still floating around in the scientific bookstores of Athens (we still had those back then, they were physical stores that you went into and they sold books that they actually had on shelves). Me and a friend once snagged a whole cardboard box full of them - new old stock from a failed bookstore IIRC. We had to draw lots to figure out who gets what, though I got the Smirnov and partial set of Landau and Lifschitz by default since they were in German which he didn't read.

Got lucky and got both volumes of Mukhin's Experimental Nuclear Physics which is an excellent textbook and also, in the section on current trends in nuclear power engineering, helpfully explains how the nuclear icebreaker Arktika has been renamed the Leonid Breznhev, and the entire Soviet nuclear physics research is being led by A.P. Alexandrov.
posted by each day we work at 9:10 AM on January 24, 2019 [2 favorites]


The children's books look amazing
posted by Damienmce at 9:11 AM on January 24, 2019


This is a great post. I found some of the MIR math textbooks at archive.org, but you have found ones that I missed!
posted by wittgenstein at 12:51 PM on January 24, 2019


I grew up in the 90s in a small town in India (Hassan). Our schooling wasn't great but it wasn't terrible. My best friend and I, however, were precocious nerds and wanted to learn more than we were being taught --- such as trigonometry in high school instead of waiting until class 11.

Our town had no bookstores but we did have a public library. The long Soviet-era relationship between India and the USSR had managed to stack our small-town library with a bunch of technical books, most of them published by MIR. We devoured them. We both learnt spherical trigonometry before we learnt plane trigonometry because we found a book about spherical astronomy first.

In our teenage years we both wanted to be physicists and MIR helped us learn the math. I fell in love with programming soon after and eventually finagled myself into a career in Silicon Valley, a dream that seemed so far away back then but somehow came true. My best friend is doing a PhD in one of the best scientific institutes in India.

We both have MIR to thank for that.

(P.S: Soviet books are also why for a year or so I became a communist, after reading the "Selected Works of Lenin" at 17).
posted by Idle Curiosity at 12:52 PM on January 24, 2019 [6 favorites]


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