Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2015 number

The article is devoted to investigation of an understudied phenomenon - the establishment of Orthodox publishing in Siberia and the Far East. The author considers the concept of «Orthodox book», the emergence of regulatory base and organizational structures of the church book publishing management, its publishing policy. The term «Orthodox book» refers not only to publications issued by the Orthodox Church publishing houses, but also to a wide range of scientific, local historical, and other literature of Orthodox content produced by secular publishers. In order to eliminate spontaneous processes occurring in the Orthodox book publishing the Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church was established. It was supposed to carry out peer review of all publications meant for distribution through the book trade system; the range of tasks for eparchial, parish and monastic publishers was outlined. It is concluded that creation of the accounting system of the Orthodox book production remains one of the unsolved problems which determined the actual source base of the present study. National bibliographiс indices issued by the Russian Book Chamber do not reflect a significant part of the Orthodox publications, due to the fact that the publishing houses do not observe the law on a legal deposit. The Synodal Library of the Moscow Patriarchate named after Alexy II, for its part, tried to oblige the dioceses to send samples of published book production to it. As a result, the Synodal Library, despite some significant gaps, has the most complete collection of Orthodox book production published throughout Russia. Therefore, its fonds can be considered as one of the most important sources for studying the Orthodox publishing in the country. A promising direction of research is dealing with the regional book chambers existing in Siberia and the Far East, as well as with fonds of diocesan libraries and archives.