MIR publishers (Moscow) published so many high quality books.
They even had the same elegant style, quality and accessibility even in their translated works.
The quality of paper used, the typesetting, the cloth binding and in general the physical attributes of their books were a work of art in itself. One can easily fall in love with the physical book just for the way it was designed, let alone the content.
The authors used in their translated works were equally exceptional in their translation.
I fondly remember reading their "Physics for entertainment" by Perelman as a translated work in good old days and it actually made me fall in love with the text book physics taught at the school level.
Given that this was an artifact when USSR made it even more fascinating. Books were priced a trifle over the shipping cost as they were likely subsidized heavily by the government.
It is sad to see that they are no more. They were likely defunded/dissolved when USSR broke up.
I am the curator/maintainer of the mirtitles.org blog and the typesetter of the books.
Thanks for the comment and putting in the perspective. The project started with the idea of preserving this knowledge about 15 years back. I grew up reading those books, but they were nowhere to be found for others to read by the end of 90s. The collection has been a collaborative effort with people from across the globe contributing to it. Though it will take some time (read years/decades), hopefully one day the collection will have all the books published during the Soviet era.
IA's browser e-reader is pretty nice to use overall, and the Mir titles seem to have been converted into various downloadable formats as well, in addition to what I'm guessing is the native PDF.
Props to the collection maintainer. This brings back some really good memories.
Note--It seems like some additional Mir books, in various states of curation, may be accessible via IA through search:
> [T]he Mir titles seem to have been converted into various downloadable formats as well, in addition to what I'm guessing is the native PDF.
You don’t have to guess—the IA metadata tells you which formats were originally provided by the uploader and which ones were derived by IA. The “download original” link on the website uses that, or you can pass --source=origial to the CLI[1].
I wish someone would translate Fichtenholz's series on calculus ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigorii_Fichtenholz ). They are the best calculus textbook I've ever read, and they really helped me to master calculus.
The construction of MIR titles reminds me a lot of older Springer GTM and Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften series titles. I have a number of Springer titles I've picked up over the years and the older printings were beautifully typeset and bound with very good paper. I try to find the older printings of Springer books when I can when chasing down a copy for my personal library.
Springer books were beautifully typeset until they started having authors do their own typesetting. That's one of the mixed blessings of LaTeX.
Even into the early 2000s, Springer would often make the first printing of a textbook sewn-bound, then subsequent printings were cheaply perfect-bound. I stopped buying new Springer books online around 2005, because I wanted to check the binding before buying.
Interesting, I must have lucked out quite often and got the first printing back in the mid to late 2000s since back then virtually all of my print Springer books I bought back then were sewn-bound.
I spent several weekends in school trawling through second-hand bookshop backrooms trying to find MIR books in that cloth bound thick paper versions..I still have the I F Sharygin book on plane geometry I found that way.
The quality of paper used, the typesetting, the cloth binding and in general the physical attributes of their books were a work of art in itself. One can easily fall in love with the physical book just for the way it was designed, let alone the content.
The authors used in their translated works were equally exceptional in their translation.
I fondly remember reading their "Physics for entertainment" by Perelman as a translated work in good old days and it actually made me fall in love with the text book physics taught at the school level.
Given that this was an artifact when USSR made it even more fascinating. Books were priced a trifle over the shipping cost as they were likely subsidized heavily by the government.
It is sad to see that they are no more. They were likely defunded/dissolved when USSR broke up.
Thank you MIR for lighting up my childhood.
RIP.
- https://mirtitles.org/
- https://mirtitles.org/2012/04/30/misha/