all power of decision regarding
publication is in the hands of party members. The official process for
publication is that the writer submits his work to the publishing house.
The publishing house then sends it, with a brief description of its
ideological content, to the Committee on Art and Culture. If the book is
approved at this stage, it is returned to the publishing house, where it
is again checked for its ideological content.

The major criterion for acceptance is the ideological soundness of the
work in question. According to a refugee playwright from Bulgaria, "The
journalist must praise the party, and government, and criticize the
West. The poet, the playwright, the novelist must uphold the communist
ideal." Since the works of leading Communists are almost always accepted
for publication, one writer has stated; "In Bulgaria dead communist
heroes are the safest bet."

The government is actively engaged in attempting to promote Bulgarian
books abroad. In the late 1960s and early 1970s books by native
authors--although in relatively small numbers--were published in such
diverse countries as Great Britain, Japan, France, Turkey, Italy, Iran,
Austria, Argentina, and Finland. According to the latest available
source on the promotion of Bulgarian books abroad, plans also have been
formulated for the publication of books in the United States, Belgium,
Brazil, and Syria.

One of the most serious problems in the publishing industry, other than
the broad issue of freedom of expression of the writers, is that of a
shortage of textbooks. In 1970 the Committee for State Control
discovered that courses in 1,013 subjects at the university level had no
textbooks whatsoever. In the University of Sofia alone, where
approximately 317 subjects were taught, textbooks existed for only 216
of these subjects; roughly half of the books for the 216 subjects that
used textbooks were out of print.

LIBRARIES

When the Communists took power in 1944, they began to allocate
relatively large sums of money to develop new libraries in both large
cities and small villages. By 1971 the country had over 10,000
libraries, whose collections numbered nearly 50 million volumes (see
table 14).

The Committee on Art and Culture maintained a number of libraries,
including the country's largest, the Bulgarian National Library. Founded
in 1878 in Sofia, it contained 814,000 works in 1971, including about
13,000 old and rare volumes, approximately