Minumsa World Literature Series Hits 500 Titles Milestone

Minumsa Publishing House has reached a significant milestone, releasing its 500th title in its World Literature Series with Lee Mi-reuk's "The River Yalu Flows." This achievement, spanning 28 years since the series began in 1998, charts the landscape of world literature enjoyed by South Korean readers.

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The World Literature Series, launched in 1998, released its 500th work this month.

The series, initiated in 1996 around Minumsa's 30th anniversary, commenced its publication in August 1998 with 10 diverse titles, including Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and Jean-Paul Sartre's "What Is Literature?" Since then, it has introduced 99 works by 32 Nobel laureates and over 70 titles previously untranslated into Korean, enriching the nation's literary scene.

Collectively, the series has published 394 works by 245 authors from 38 countries, with approximately 23 million copies sold. Minumsa illustrates the series' vastness by comparing its total page count laid end-to-end to over 43 kilometers, longer than a marathon, and its total copies laid flat to a distance of 3,365 kilometers, equivalent to more than ten round trips between Seoul and Busan.

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This is the 500th book in a single series, the first in South Korea, published in June 2026.

Linguistically, the series comprises 36.6% English works, followed by French (15%), German (11.4%), Russian (9%), and Spanish (7%). The most popular titles, based on sales figures, are Hermann Hesse's "Demian" (813,000 copies), J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" (665,615 copies), and Osamu Dazai's "No Longer Human" (600,000 copies), demonstrating a strong reader appetite for classic and influential global literature.

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It has been 4 years since the 400th book, Kim Soo-young's 'Poetry, Spit on It,' was published in January 2022, and 28 years since the first book, Ovid's 'Metamorphoses,' was released.