Back in communism, they did not publish too many, yet a lot. Not many titles, but always around a hundred thousand copies of each. If you wonder why on Earth so many copies were published for a country with a small population of around 20 million, the answer is simple. Everything was centralized and the entire country got its sources from the center. From Bucuresti and the Communist Party. So, when they printed a book, they made sure it reached every corner of the country, every bookstore, every library, every school. And that’s a lot.
In the ‘90s the Romanian genre writers hoped we could get back to publishing books in the hundreds of thousands, so we tried to recreate this distribution network, but we failed. There was no more centralized economy.
In a way the Communism was a writer’s Golden Age and Dark Ages wrapped up in a bundle.
In the 70’s two publishing houses put out collections of SF & F books: “The Triangle Collection” from Albatros Publishing House and the CRSF (“The Collection of Science Fiction Novels”) from Univers Publishing House, both in Bucuresti. The occasional SF&F book was published by other publishing houses with no label. You’d have to really know your stuff to discover them all.
The only genre magazine of that period was “CPSF” or (“The Collection of Science Fiction Stories”) which lasted from 1955 (see bellow the cover of the first issue) to 1974, publishing an equal number of Romanian writers and foreign writers. Mostly European writers with the occasional American. It was one of those political movements meant to show the West that we’re opening to them. Obviously, it couldn’t last forever with the Soviets looming nearby.
The magazine ran for 466 issues, published twice and sometimes three times a month, and distributed both in Romania and Eastern Germany. A Hungarian edition also existed that lasted for 80 issues.
That was the big picture as I began discovering my Science Fiction territory.
Albatros Publishing House published from four to eight books a year in its “Triangle Collection”, featuring one foreign writer and the rest Romanians. Univers Publishing House published exclusively foreign authors once every few years for its “CRSF Collection”. So all in all we had years with only four genre books and years with as many as twenty-four genre books, like 1975, the most abundant year in two decades.
It was perfect for an 8 year old who was also in love with Alexander Dumas, Paul Feval and Michel Zevaco’s adventures and dug rapidly through all the mystery, detective and spy collections. There was more to read than I had time with school, childhood and all communism related activities (later about them).
After Gerard Klein I read Vladimir Colin and H.G. Wells. I read Wells because my father had all his books and after finishing “The Time Machine” I was hooked on Wells.
As for Vladimir Colin, I became familiar with his name from Klein’s novel, as Colin had been the translator. Only later, in the ‘80s, I realized that Colin was one of the major Romanian names in the genre. Some say the most important one, but I tend not to deal in absolute values.
Anyway, Vladimir Colin was one of the few allowed to travel to Eurocons and one of the very few translated into several languages. He’d won Eurocon’s Award for best novel of the year three times (one time in front of Stanislaw Lem). He also won the Golden Medal at Poznan, Poland; the Grand Award at San Marino for “Opera Omnia” and numerous Romanian genre and literary awards. Although his books had been translated in at least 10 languages, English was not one of them.
My first Colin book was “Legendele tarii lui Vam” (The Legends of the country of Vam), which is an inversed mythology with man at its core and not the gods. It’s the story of the struggle of people to free themselves from gods.
During the years, I read Colin as soon as I discovered a new book of his. Amazingly, they were not as easy to find as Wells’ books. For some sold out titles I had to wait another decade, entering the fandom and borrowing them from more seasoned readers.
