The Kashkin Dynasty and the Catalogues of Sales of Books and Music in Provincial Cities during the Second Half of the 19th and the Early 20th Centuries (from the Collections of the Russian State Library)

Abstract

The article examines the work of bookstores and music stores in provincial cities. Their owners successfully adopted their manners of doing business of their colleagues from the two Russian capital cities and formed individual advertising mechanisms of their commercial operations that brought steady and stable incomes. At the present time, the characteristic features and structures of the small enterprises of that time period that were in serious competition with each other and worked to increase consumer demand and expand the market for their products, are of great interest to researchers. Among them is the Kashkin dynasty, which created a successful network of sales of books and music in Voronezh, Orel, Tver and other provincial cities. Its representatives, two brothers, Vladimir Dmitrievich and Lev Dmitrievich Kashkin, realized their potentials in detail in their commercial, creative, and social activities. The Kashkins’ bookstores and libraries epitomized their unique family experience, observed upon acquaintance with their special catalogues, which provided a distinct documentary testimony of the era. They contain valuable information about the structure and the content of the book and library funds, their quantitative and qualitative indicators, and their system of working with clients. The author of the article sees as being especially important the opening of new categories for sales of musical literature and musical instruments. In this context, this material has not yet appeared in the focus of scholarly research and appears for the first time from the position of comprehension the music publishing business in the Russian culture of the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries.