The Communist Manifesto for this purpose. Works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin were published on a very large scale, and cheap editions of their works were available in several languages across the world. These publications were either shorter writings or they were compendia such as the various editions of Marx and Engels' "Selected Works", or their "Collected Works". This affected the destiny of the "Manifesto" in several ways. Firstly, in terms of circulation; in 1932 the American and British Communist Parties printed several hundred thousand copies of a cheap edition for "probably the largest mass edition ever issued in English". Secondly the work
The Communist Manifesto entered political-science syllabuses in universities, which would only expand after the Second World War. For its centenary in 1948, its publication was no longer the exclusive domain of Marxists and academicians; general publishers too printed the "Manifesto" in large numbers. "In short, it was no longer only a classic Marxist document," Hobsbawm noted, "it had become a political classic "tout court"." Even after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s, the "Communist Manifesto" remains ubiquitous; Hobsbawm says that "In states without censorship, almost certainly anyone within reach of a good bookshop, and certainly anyone within reach of a