One-Sixth of the World's Surface

This is the text of One-Sixth of the World's Surface, by Russell Wright. It was published in Hammond, Indiana in 1932 by the author. This lack of an editor shows in the finished product, believe me. Chapter twelve is twice as long as any other chapter, the spelling and punctuation are inconsistent, and the photos are blurry.

I found this book about fifteen years ago in the sale bin at the St. Louis Public Library. I believe I paid a dime.

The book is interesting for several reasons. To begin with, it's an amateur travelogue, a genre that seems to have died out these days -- though it is making a comeback, in somewhat condensed form, on the web. Few people take the time to relate minute details of their experiences travelling these days; I think it's because travel is easier and cheaper on the whole, so it's assumed that someone really interested in a given place will just go their himself.

More interesting is an American view of the Soviet Union before World War II. Wright is at least a fellow-traveller if not a communist, and he's ready to overlook almost anything that reflects poorly on the Soviet Union. Some of his rationalizations and excuses are enough to provoke actual laughter, but it must be remembered that he was writing in the early 1930s, when perhaps the expectations of economic performance were pretty low, no matter where you were. Some of his observations, though, foreshadow what would happen to the Soviet economy in later years, as the flaws of Marxism and of government corruption could no longer be papered over.

The photographs are marginal scans at best, but then the photos in the book are themselves marginal. I might be able to enhance the contrast a bit, but the photos as printed in the book are in fact crooked and out-of-focus.

I have proofread the text, but there are certainly still some OCR-related errors in it. These generally show up as single apostrophes, periods, commas, and the like. There are also probably a number of solitary 1s and | symbols -- these latter being the result of the typesetter's practice of setting exclamation parts on their own (like this !), rather than immediately next to the word.

Wright uses a number of em dashes, which the OCR picks up as hyphens, and which I have attempted to correct using " -- ". I am sure I have missed a bunch of these.

I have tried to correct as many errors as I could, but it's difficult, as I would like to maintain as much as possible of Wright's original idiosyncractic spelling and punctuation. I would appreciate any glaring problems, like random chunks of OCR garbage, being brought to my attention.

Tino

Preface