In Russia, the use of the printing press began in the middle of the 16th century. Book
printing in Moscow was interrupted during the Time of Troubles and restored in
1614/1615. In the 17th century, ...the process developed technically and culturally. Book printing Prikaz was established to manage the Printing House. This paper tries to summarize activities of MPH (Moscow Print House) in the period of 1615–1700 on the basis of the continuous study of documents from the Prikaz’s Archive: the character of the repertoire (analysis covers 632 titles according to Archive instead of the 469 that physically survived and was listed in the A. S. Zernova’ catalogue (№ 30–498)) and its change depending on the internal and external priorities of the state.
In this study for the first time there were specified exactly the number of copies in a run, production cost and decreed selling price.Using documents from the Archive and notes written in the books the social and geographical aspects of the proliferation of tens of thousand of new published books were established; these has allowed to prove that in the late 1730s a printed book already had become a real factor in the development of majority of Russian regions, and that be the middle of the century, a common Slavic book market has been formed.
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