The demand for popular science literature grew steadily, but translations from foreign languages constituted the majority of such publications until the last third of the 19th century. At the turn of the century, almost every significant publishing house in Russia paid attention to the popularization of science by printing journals, books, and series. Yet, the commonly accepted name for this new genre acquired its final form as «scientific-popular literature» only in the early 1920s. By then, after the end of the Civil War, about 36% of all printed book titles in Soviet Russia dealt with science and popular science. This article analyzes the birth of the genre and its name in the Russian-language literature on the basis of some rare primary and bibliographic sources.

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