In the light of the terrible attack on the Vivat publishing house this week in Kharkiv which saw the loss of at least seven lives, many injured, and many thousands of books destroyed, we have placed orders today for a further 10 Vivat books that we will be able to add to our catalogue in due course.

We already have 33 books in the UL published by Vivat, 29 in Ukrainian and 4 in Russian, catalogue records for all of which you can see here.  Several of these featured in a blog post in February marking two years since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, 24.02.2022 in the words of Ukrainians, some of whose covers are shown above.

The new orders we have placed (with links to their records on the site of the bookshop we bought them from) are:

• Konotopsʹka vidʹma
• Rivnovaha
• Nevelychka drama
• Bytva za z︠h︡ytti︠a︡: shchodennyk 2022 roku
• I︠A︡ prat︠s︡i︠u︡i︠u︡ na t︠s︡vyntari
• Vidbiĭ povitri︠a︡noï tryvohy
• Chomu Ukraïna vyhrai︠e︡
• Babusi︠a︡ vmyraty ne li︠u︡byla
• Dykyĭ Zakhid Skhidnoï I︠E︡vropy
• and a second Cambridge copy of the war diary of the murdered author Volodymyr Vakulenko, I︠A︡ peretvori︠u︡i︠u︡sʹ… : shchodennyk okupat︠s︡iï, vybrani virshi (cover shown above), this one for the MMLL Faculty Library

Times are bad in much of the world for authors, publishers, and readers, with libraries and archives lost through war in Ukraine and Gaza and more, and with increasing book bans in the US and elsewhere.  We are extremely fortunate in Cambridge to be able to provide a safe home for books and ongoing access to them for our readers.  It is something to celebrate particularly in dark times.

We’ll write a further post when the books on order have arrived.

Mel Bach