About Bibliotheca Marxista

The printed output of the twentieth-century Left — book clubs, party presses, state publishers of translated classics — is scattered across library catalogues, dealer lists and personal shelves. This project gathers those backlists in one open, citable place.

What counts

Any publishing house, press, imprint or book club whose list was substantially Marxist, communist, socialist or anti-colonial — party and state presses, independent radical houses and book clubs, defunct or still active, from any country and in any language. Where a house later turned to a general list, only its years as a press of the Left are catalogued. The globe on the home page places each press by country and by its side in the Cold War; the International pages group presses by the Internationals and movements they belonged to.

Authors

Author pages cover Marxist, socialist and anti-colonial writers, theorists and organisers — party leaders and historians, novelists and poets of the Left, guerrilla memoirists, and Marxist and socialist feminists who wrote on gender, patriarchy and social reproduction — from every continent. Each page lists the author's editions in the catalogue, together with the first editions of their main works, and cites a biographical source.

Verified and unverified records

A title is marked verified when it has been matched to a library catalogue record — from a national or research library such as those listed below, or an Open Library record copied from one — whose imprint names this publisher, its place and a year within the house's years of operation. Every verified record links to the catalogue entries it was checked against.

Titles marked unverified have not yet been matched: they may come from a crowd-sourced record without a library catalogue source, or from a published list that no catalogue record has confirmed.

Sources

Much of the catalogue is imported from Open Library, which aggregates records from libraries worldwide. It is checked and extended against national and research library catalogues:

• the Library of Congress;
• the German National Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France;
• SUDOC, the union catalogue of French university libraries, and swisscovery in Switzerland;
• the German union catalogues K10plus and B3Kat, with the Berlin and Bavarian State Libraries' East European and Chinese collections;
• the National Library of Poland and Spain's Biblioteca Nacional;
• the National Diet Library and CiNii in Japan;
• HathiTrust, the shared digital library of research libraries, whose records and open scans are both used;
• the Internet Archive and BannedThought.net, whose scans are linked where a title can be read online.

Author pages draw on Wikipedia and Wikidata for biographical details. Errors in any of these records can carry over; titles, languages and spellings are normalised on import, but some mistakes will remain.

Reusing the catalogue

Bibliotheca Marxista is free to use, copy and build on, under three licences:

• the catalogue's data (publishers, titles, author records and the downloads) under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0: credit Bibliotheca Marxista, and share a database you make from it under the same licence;
• its texts (the histories of the houses, the authors' biographies and these pages) under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0;
• its code under the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0: a modified version run as a public site must publish its changes.

The records come from the sources listed above. Most release their catalogue data into the public domain (Open Library, Wikidata, the Library of Congress, the German National Library, K10plus, B3Kat, the Biblioteca Nacional de España and the National Library of Poland), and swisscovery's are free for general use. Others are reused on condition that they are credited:

• records of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and of ABES (SUDOC), under the French government's Licence Ouverte;
• CiNii Books (National Institute of Informatics), whose NACSIS-CAT records are open data under CC BY 4.0;
• the National Diet Library, under its terms for bibliographic data, compatible with CC BY 4.0;
• HathiTrust, whose records include data from OCLC's WorldCat.

Scans and texts held elsewhere are linked, not copied, and remain under their own terms.

Download the data

The catalogue — publishers, author pages and titles, with their sources — can be downloaded as JSON for research, citation managers or other projects: the whole of it, or one publisher's backlist. The file is put together from the catalogue as it downloads, so it is always current.