Here is a question I didn't get to last night. Karl Miller wrote:
***Where in the scheme of things does MK (Mezhdurodnaya Kniga?) fit in?
This term means International Books. It was the Soviet bureau that exported books, records, and collectible postage
stamps. Throughout their history they never showed any understanding of records or stamps. They attempted to sell
all three categories to book stores, but generally they would contract with only one store per country. They assumed
that this store would not onlly sell
retail but would act as the distributor for stores in the rest of the country. It rarely worked out that way, so
Soviet publications would be available in only one place in any country. The U.S. was lucky. They had two. One was
the Four Continents in NYC which later evolved imto Victor Kamkin, and there was another in San Francisco. MK
required a minimum purchase of 200 copies of
any record. So there was a tendency to have many left over for decades while interesting ones sold out and stores
couldn't reorder just a few more. Ukranian Books in Toronto had a huge warehouse filled with hundreds of copies of
early 70s LPs well into the 1990s. MK never understood how to use record distributors.