Physical education and sports | 72 | 53 | 19 Scientific and educational texts | 397 | 301 | 96 Literary criticism | 133 | 55 | 78 Art | 152 | 118 | 34 Languages | 70 | 66 | 4 Artistic and folkloric literature | 609 | 534 | 75 Juvenile literature | 277 | 146 | 131 Atheism and religion | 8 | 7 | 1 General handbooks | 2 | 2 | ... | ----- | ----- | ----- TOTAL | 4,188 | 3,157 | 1,031 -------------------------------------+--------------+--------+-------- The party is the final arbiter regarding the acceptability of work for publication. All party control, however, is theoretically unofficial; censorship exists only in the sense that all power of decision regarding publication is in the hands of party members. The official process for publication is that the writer submits his work to the publishing house. The publishing house then sends it, with a brief description of its ideological content, to the Committee on Art and Culture. If the book is approved at this stage, it is returned to the publishing house, where it is again checked for its ideological content. The major criterion for acceptance is the ideological soundness of the work in question. According to a refugee playwright from Bulgaria, "The journalist must praise the party, and government, and criticize the West. The poet, the playwright, the novelist must uphold the communist ideal." Since the works of leading Communists are almost always accepted for publication, one writer has stated; "In Bulgaria dead communist heroes are the safest bet." The government is actively engaged in attempting to promote Bulgarian books abroad. In the late 1960s and early 1970s books by native authors--although in relatively small numbers--were published in such diverse countries as Great Britain, Japan, France, Turkey, Italy, Iran, Austria, Argentina, and Finland. According to the latest available source on the promotion of Bulgarian books abroad, plans also have been formulated for the publication of books in the United States, Belgium, Brazil, and Syria. One of the most serious problems in the publishing industry, other than the broad issue of freedom of expression of the writers, is that of a shortage of textbooks. In 1970 the Committee for State Control discovered that courses in 1,013 subjects at the university level had no textbooks whatsoever. In the University of Sofia alone, where approximately 317 subjects were taught, textbooks existed for only 216 of these subjects; roughly half of the books for the 216 subjects that used textbooks were out of print. LIBRARIES