Socialism: Utopian and Scientific of thousands of copies. Throughout the decade of the 1860s, Karl Marx, close personal friend and political associate of Friedrich Engels, dedicated himself to the study of economics, culminating in the publication of the first volume of "Das Kapital" in 1867. Marx's lengthy and ponderous volume was extremely difficult for the average to penetrate, however, leading Engels to suggest to Marx in a letter of September 16, 1868 that a short popularized version of "Das Kapital" for a working class audience was urgently needed. "If it is not written, some Moses or other will come along and do it and
Das Kapital will read it, and even fewer will understand it". Nonetheless, Marx acknowledged that Russia was the country where "Capital" "was read and valued more than anywhere". The Russian edition was the fastest selling. 3,000 copies were sold in one year while the German edition took five years to sell 1,000, thus the Russian translation sold fifteen times faster than the German original. In the wake of the global economic collapse of 2008–2009, "Das Kapital" was reportedly in high demand in Germany. In 2012, Red Quill Books released "Capital: In Manga!", a comic book version of Volume I which is an