Victor Kamkin Catalog No. 14 1959

Victor Kamkin, Inc
Bookstore
No. 14 1959
Washington, DC

The Victor Kamkin Bookstore was a retail book shop with a main location in Rockville, Maryland and a smaller store in New York City in the United States. Established in 1953 by Victor Kamkin and his wife Elena Kamkina, the store maintained continuous operation throughout the Cold War era, specializing in material published in the Soviet Union. In 2002 flagging sales, increased competition, and escalating costs foreshadowed a forced end to the operation. With some two million unsold volumes remaining in inventory, the store became the object of widespread media coverage, and thousands of customers flooded the store. Some 60,000 volumes were additionally saved from incineration through the prompt action of Congressional Representative Connie Morella and Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. The reprieve proved to be short-lived, however, and although some more marketable titles made their way to the inventories of other retailers of Russian-language books, hundreds of thousands of volumes were ultimately destroyed at the time of the store’s forced liquidation in 2006.

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