March 22, 1963: A large exhibition of USSR Technical Books will open at The Brooklyn Museum on Saturday, March 30 under the auspices of the Soviet-American cultural exchange program. The exhibition will remain on view through April 25.
Featured in the display will be about 4000 Soviet manuals, textbooks and journals in all fields of scientific and technical knowledge as well as rare volumes dating back to the 15th century. Also included will be a selection of films on science, industry and medicine featuring documentaries on Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight, thermonuclear research and new Soviet surgical techniques. Just about every aspect of Soviet technical publications from the fine arts to food industry will be represented.
Some of the volumes have been translated into English and English speaking guides will be available throughout the exhibition area to answer visitor’s questions. Members of the Soviet staff will also give lectures on scientific and technological topics. Catalogues of books on display and souvenir badges will be issued free to anyone interested.
After the exhibition closes at The Brooklyn Museum, it will be seen at Detroit’s Cobo Hall and finally at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. A similar exhibit of United States technical books is presently touring the Soviet Union.
The special invitational opening of the exhibition will be attended by His Excellency Anatoliy Dobrynin, Soviet Ambassador to the United States, and Mr. Edward R. Murrow, Director of the United States Information Agency.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1953 - 1970. 1963, 008.
March 29, 1963: The Soviet Technical Book Exhibit will be shown in New York, Chicago, and Detroit, under the scientific and cultural exchange agreement between the Soviet and U.S. Governments. A similar American Technical Book Exhibit is now held in the Soviet Union.
Speaking to a group of American businessmen in 1959, Prime Minister Khruschev said: "Let us expand our cultural contacts. Let us exchange more delegations...Our commitment is to a greater range of contacts, extension of cultural and scientific relations, exchange of scientific literature and cooperation with the United States as well as any other nation regardless of its social system.”
The exchange of Technical Book exhibits reflecting the advances in science and engineering in both our countries cannot fail to promote understanding between the American and Soviet people.
We hope the visitors will find it both an interesting and useful experience to learn about Soviet scientific and technical advances at first hand, as it were, from the more than 3,500 books and magazines shown here.
We will do our best for the visitors to form a clearer understanding of the ways and circumstances in which over a comparatively short period, as history goes, the Soviet Union became a land of advanced engineering and wonderful scientific discoveries and the first nation to blaze the trail to space for the good of the entire mankind.
Apart from books on science and engineering, the visitor will find at our exhibition college textbooks, manuals, and examples of mass-produced works on popular science for the lay reader.
This wide range of publications will provide an overall picture of the Soviet system of technical education, library establishment and mass propaganda of science and engineering. To the extent that this is possible, American visitors will have a chance to see for themselves that all advances in science and culture in the USSR belong to the people, aim to secure peaceful objectives, and serve to improve the people’s welfare.
Regardless of their national or social background, all Soviet people enjoy every opportunity to receive an education at any level, improve their professional standards and fully develop their natural talents.
Inherent as they are in our social system, it is these very conditions that formed the basis from which have sprung forth the ever-growing inexhaustible popular resources that keep promoting Soviet science, engineering, culture and arts.
It is our sincere hope that every visitor to our exhibition will find useful and impartial information here. Thus, the exhibition will serve its noble purpose of further promoting friendship between the peoples of the USA and the USSR.
Thank you.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1953 - 1970. 1963, 009.
