
Mir Books - weinzierl
https://mirtitles.org/
======
rajekas
Many many years ago, I used to take the 560 from Kamal Cinema to Connaught
Place (in Delhi for those who don't know these references) with a couple of
geeky friends.

We would walk from the CP bus terminus to Connaught Circle, grab a bite to eat
at Nirulas and then make the pilgrimage to the MIR store, which used to occupy
a huge space right in the middle of the circle. I don't even know what's in
that space now. Probably a McDonalds or a jewelry store.

That's where I bought books by Piskunov, Nikolskii, Perelman and many many
other books. I still remember being puzzled that every discovery that had one
name attached to it in the the western texts that I got out of the British
Council Library - the next stop in the pilgrimage - had another name, usually
ending in -ov or -sky attached to it in the MIR books.

That was before the end of the Soviet Union, liberalization and Shining India.
That world has faded away faster than my imagined memories of Gondor.

~~~
balladeer
Was it a Mir store? Or is it People’s Publication office/bookstore? The book
store/publishing house run by ICP? They are still around. They used to stock
Progress Publication books too - USSR’s literary cousin of Mir (they’ve
stopped stocking Mir now). I am not from Delhi but whenever I’d visit I’d go
there to check out some translations, especially Hindi translations of Russian
works. I still go - I was introduced to Russian literature in Hindi and I
still crave for that. I bought Cossacks’s Hindi translation few months back.

PS. I bought my first IE Irodov in Delhi though. Sunday market.

~~~
rajekas
It wasn't called MIR for sure. People's Publishing House or some variant
sounds about right. I am amazed that it's still there - does it occupy a
cavernous space in the heart of the circle?

Edit: it's quite possible that what's called PPH now is the inheritor of the
space I used to go to, but it's not the same space as far as I can tell from
online photos.

~~~
balladeer
PPH isn’t tiny but wouldn’t call it very big either. The only other book store
from there I recall was named something like The English Book Store. I’ve been
going there since 2004ish only I think. Once in 2-3 years maybe. I’m going to
Delhi in a few weeks, if I manage to visit Connaught Place I’ll look/ask
around :)

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cambalache
Ah, a Mir book, what a nostalgia trip. A friend of mine gave me a physical-
chemistry lab textbook (translated to Spanish) and it has been the best
scientific undergraduate lab book I have ever used (as student and lab
teacher). Very nice experiments and explanations. The only con is that, as
with many soviet things at the time, they barely gave any recognition to the
western european scientific legacy, so almost any principle you associate with
a western European name(Boyles Law, Avogadro Number, etc) was named after a
soviet scientist who supposedly discovered it first. To be honest I never
bothered to research about how valid were those claims.

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the-mitr
I am the maintainer/curator of the mirtitles blog. Please also have a look at
our gitlab page where we are typesetting some of the classics in LaTeX

[https://gitlab.com/mirtitles](https://gitlab.com/mirtitles)

~~~
enriquto
That's a stunning quality curation, really impressive!

I would love to see more math books in there. There are some great and dear
books from my youth that do not still appear...

Just one question: what is the motivation for re-typesetting the text? The
original typeset was already beautiful. Why didn't you go the way of simply
giving an OCRd pdf ?

~~~
the-mitr
The motivation was purely electronic text, though OCR is good for text for
mathematics it may not be that good. And it is fun typesetting the books you
love!

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machawinka
If the Soviet Union did one thing right, Mir was it. I owe my love to applied
math to it.

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newprint
My native is Russian. For those who don't know, Mir translates as: 1. World,
2. Peace, 3. Microcosm, 4. Non-Religious life (в миру).

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carlob
There were also Italian translations of Russian books, which were very popular
slightly before my time as a student.

On the other hand one of my most prized possessions is a hardcover version of
Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games in Russian that I bought at a flea market
for less than $2.

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Mikhail_Edoshin
In Soviet Union "Mir" was well-known for its translations of foreign
scientific and technical literature. I never realized "Mir" published English
translations of Russian books too.

In my (very one-sided and biased) opinion Soviet Union was a very provincial
country immensely handicapped in its scientific and cultural life by being cut
off from the world. (Although it might not look like that in 1960s when it was
proudly going into space and testing atomic weapons.) But there existed good
fundamental science and some original thinkers and authors worth translating
and studying.

~~~
rramadass
Mir publications (in English and other languages) were very popular in many
countries of the world where they were affordable and available. It was one of
the best things to come out of the Soviet era. They were excellent across the
board. It is fashionable nowadays to badmouth everything "Soviet" but their
focus on educating the masses in Science & Technology was farsighted.

See my responses in this thread -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346272)
where i am exhorting people to bring them back into print :-)

From the above same thread, link to the archive -
[https://archive.org/details/@mirtitles?&sort=-publicdate&pag...](https://archive.org/details/@mirtitles?&sort=-publicdate&page=1)

~~~
the-mitr
I am the maintainer/curator of the mirtitles blog. Thanks for the comment, we
had thought of republishing also. Perhaps Little Mathematics Library comes to
mind first due to the smaller number of pages. But it got stalled due to other
commitments that I had. But we are surely looking in this direction as well.

~~~
rramadass
Thanks for responding and Appreciate all your hard work on this. This
knowledge needs to be saved for posterity.

Just thinking aloud, why not approach the Russian publishing houses (and maybe
the Russian govt. itself?) to get behind this and fund it? Or maybe a tie-up
with well-known technical book publishers like Oxford/Cambridge publishing (i
myself am partial to Dover Publications) to start a line under "Mir Titles"? A
few professors to edit out the obvious propaganda material and everything
should be good for mass market. I sense a good business opportunity here :-)

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fmajid
Some are widely regarded classics like Landau & Lifshitz’ course on physics.

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akudha
When I was a kid, I used to buy handful of Russian books (translated to
English) for the price of one American book. For a poor kid, it was awesome.
Ah, good days they were...

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rcshubhadeep
I usually do not comment on threads. But upvote for sure! This one is
different. Nostalgia, First Science Education... What not! Thanks a lot for
the website.

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enriquto
The TeX recreations are amazingly good quality. I would like to buy
professional prints of some of them, but it does not seem that they are
selling them.

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flak48
Brings back great memories of solving I.E Irodov's problems in physics. Made
you feel like a genius whenever you cracked one.

