Publishing Contract for Scientific Editing (Baku, 1959): A Documentary Source on the Editorial and Professional Practice of an Industry Executive

This deposit presents Contract No. 538 "for scientific editing," concluded in Baku on 11 February 1959 between the Azerbaijan State Publishing House of Petroleum and Scientific-Technical Literature (Aznefteizdat) and Abutalib M. Abdullayev (1912–1980), commissioning him to edit the Azerbaijani translation of A. S. Smirnov and A. I. Shirkovsky's Gas Production and Transport. The source is a printed publisher's form with typewritten and handwritten entries, preserved in a personal archive. The deposit includes a facsimile of the contract, working English and Azerbaijani translations, images of the cover, title page and imprint of the published book (Part 2, Baku, 1960), and a short analytical note. The note examines the contract's eight-part definition of scientific editing, which combines ideological review with technical checking, its payment schedule and production obligations, and what it shows about an industry executive's participation in textbook preparation during the gasification of Azerbaijan. The publication is relevant today because it makes openly available a rare primary source for the history of Soviet technical publishing and of Azerbaijan's gas industry: completed contracts of this kind are scarcely represented in open digital collections. It offers material for current research in the history of science, economic history, and the comparative study of "executive-expert" roles, as well as for the question of how editorial responsibility combined professional checking with political control. This publication is associated with the deposit "Scholarly Works and Editorial Activity of a Head of the Gas Industry of the Azerbaijan SSR (1960–1976)" and serves as a continuation of the publications "Pedagogical Activity of a Soviet Industry Executive of the AzSSR Gas Industry" and "The Communal-Construction Technical College of the Azerbaijan SSR", while also complementing the monograph "Gasification and Operation of the Gas Economy of Azerbaijan (1955–1970): A Historical and Sociological StudyGasification and Operation of the Gas Sector of Azerbaijan (1955–1970): A Historical and Sociological Study" (2023).