About fifteen years ago, I bought a book called One-Sixth of the World’s Surface from the St. Louis Public Library’s bargain table . It’s a personal travelogue of the American author’s trip through the Soviet Union in 1931.

The author is a Communist, or at least a fellow-traveller, and he’s agog at just how wonderful the Soviet Union is — although he finds some cities to be quite dirty. It’s not entirely unlike a pale Red version of Democracy in America.

I have scanned in the book, and it’s now available, complete with illustrations, here in Tinotopia.

Whether the book is still under copyright I have no way of knowing. It was published by the author in 1932; that copyright would have expired in 1960. If the copyright was renewed in 1960, it would then have run out in 1988, which effectively means that it’s in perpetual copyright, thanks to the Great Perpetual Copyright Scam being put over on us by Disney and the Congress.

In any case, the book isn’t being exploited now — web searches turn up nothing — and it’s too interesting to just leave languishing on my shelf.