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Comment by the-mitr | Hacker News Reader

Maintainer/curator of the blog here. Please feel free to ask anything.

Glad to see this on the front page on HN, we had a similar bump some years back!

I inherited a large (to me) collection of books from the USSR from my grandfather who immigrated here. Do you know how someone could find a collector or something who would appreciate them? I'm not looking to make money here, I just don't want the books to stay on the shelf of someone who will never read or appreciate them.

We could host them, I personally have a collection of about 2k Soviet books, about 6-7k in total.

Do you have an email? Most of these are going to be medical books. Would love to connect.

Yes, please write to us at mirtitles at the rate gmail

It’s amusing how many of us on this thread are South Asians (you surely must be from “At the rate”, and I recognize some commenters here to be so from other conversations and others from their names). I wonder if we were the top English readership for this publisher.

Any idea of the topics?

Medicine and jokes

Have you thought about a printing service so people can order hard copies from you/your-company? It will allow you to maintain/fund this work which i think is very much needed.

Also maybe redesign the site so it is more easily searchable (fast, functional but no jazz).

I have bought a few print copies from low-cost publishers on Amazon India but the quality has been iffy. Would be willing to pay extra for better quality.

Yes, there was something in the pipeline to print, nicely (re)typeset books around the time covid stuck and the plan got sidelines. Will see if there is a possibility again.

We are using worpdress.com for the hosting, so that more focus is on curating the content with minimum maintenance required (it is mostly me, with little help from colleagues every now and then).

Very cool.

(Love to also see a collection of Soviet Life magazine. What's out there, that I have been able to find, is pretty slim.)

Magazines are tricky to get hold of, as they were ephemeral and not seen to be of lasting value. Two magazines which we have been looking for are Misha! (though some volumes are there) and Science in the USSR, ( I distinctly remember one with interviews about great Lev Landau by his colleagues).

Misha and Soviet Woman were quite common in the 80s. I remember that the paper and print was much better than what we were used to.

Hi! Is it possible to grab all these books as one bundle? I want to keep them locally for preservation and my kids when they grow up

You can download the entire collection via our Internet Archive collection. You can use the export option from advanced search and keep mir-titles as the collection, then use wget or curl to download all of them.

Thank you for the effort of putting together the site and material, making the world a better place.

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