Literature was under the jurisdiction of Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment. According to Grunberger, "At the beginning of the war this department supervised no less than 2,500 publishing houses, 23,000 bookshops, 3,000 authors, 50 national literary prizes, 20,000 new books issued annually, and a total of 1 million titles constituting the available book market." Germany was Europe's biggest producer of books—in terms both of total annual production and the number of individual new titles appearing each year. In 1937, at 650 million RM, the average sales value of the books produced took third place in the statistics on goods, after coal and wheat. The first National Socialist literature commission, set itself the goal of eradicating the literature of the ‘System Period’, as Weimar was contemptuously called, and of propagating volkisch-nationalist literature in the Nazis state. Literature was recognized early on as an essential political tool in the Third Reich as virtually 100 percent of the German population was literate. "The most widely-read-or displayed-book of the period was Hitler's "Mein Kampf", a collection (according to Lion Feuchtwanger) of 164,000 offences against German grammar and syntax; by 1940, it was, with 6 million copies sold, the solitary front-runner in the German best-seller list, some 5 million copies ahead of Rainer Maria Rilke and others."