A new book factory will be built in Ukraine

TakyBook printing house, which launched a new production facility in the western Ukrainian city of Drohobych in September 2022, plans to build a new Drohobych Book Factory. 

As a member of the Helvetica publishing group, TakyBook operates alongside eight other publishing houses, maintaining offices in Kherson, Odesa, Sumy, and other Ukrainian cities, as well as its Baltia Publishing division in Riga. 

Currently, the printing house operates from a rented space in Lishnia, a small town adjacent to Drohobych, printing books for both Ukrainian and international clients. According to its owner Bohdan Holovko, the idea to build a new factory had been mulled over since  2022. Drohobych, as the selected factory location, offered certain economic advantages over Lviv. 

The factory, set to open in 2026, is currently seeking investors. Its plans include a Central European Book Museum, housing a unique collection of printed works. The collection now includes 150 books, but its goal is to expand to 2,000 volumes featuring rare Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ukrainian books predating 1914, including a lifetime edition of Panteleimon Kulish’s “Chorna rada” (“The Black Council”).

As reported earlier, on May 23, 2024, a Russian missile destroyed the Factor Druk printing house in Kharkiv. Read our report A month after the Russian strike on Kharkiv printing house: What is the impact on the industry?

Drohobych is a city in western Ukraine, located 80 km from Lviv. Founded in the 11th century, the city is known as the birthplace of several important literary figures, including Yuriy Drohobych, writer and rector of the University of Bologna; Bruno Schulz, Polish-Jewish writer, fine artist, and literary critic; and Ivan Franko, Ukrainian writer, scholar, and Nobel Prize nominee. The city became the site of Ukraine’s first oil refinery in 1863, and the oil industry has, ever since, influenced the city’s economic development.

“Chorna rada” (“The Black Council”), the first historical novel in Ukrainian literature and the first novel written in modern Ukrainian, was authored by renowned writer, translator, poet, and folklorist Panteleimon Kulish in 1845-46. An English translation by George S. N. Luckyj and Moira Luckyj is available in the Electronic Library of Ukrainian Literature, Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto

Copy editing: Ben Angel, Joy Tataryn, Terra Friedman King