There are many European languages with very few speakers, where the level of literary output would be correspondingly low.
For example? Luxemburgish? 2,000 books published in 2001. Cornish, Breton, Welsh? There specialised publishers for that. Several. Catalan? The local government (Generalitat) spends a fortune on publishing, translation, libraries. Baske? The same applies, it is politics. Lithuania? 3,479, (2021) according to the link to wikipedia I provided. Latvian? 2,375 (2020). Estonian? 5,809 (2020).
Languages are politically and culturally important in Europe, governments spend a lot protecting and promoting local languages. It is part of our identity. What is a low number for you? Even English dialects are widely published.
It’s embarrassing to admit how many of those books I have. There still aren’t tons of books in Cornish… maybe a shelf’s worth, maybe two or three. But there aren’t tons of Cornish readers (though if you read Welsh or both Breton and English, Cornish isn’t that difficult to read).
https://www.papiros.org/it/categorie/le-petit-prince-in.../ is just an example of The Little Prince translated into teeny, tiny dialects—some have a couple of million spearkers (Sicilian) and some only a few thousand (Calabrian Greek). Cornish has maybe a few hundred speakers at the outside but there are still books.
For people who aren’t native English speakers their language is often their identity, which may or may not also align with nationality. States recognise that maintaining language fluency - at least of their dominant and official languages - is critical to maintaining their separate identity as a nation, so they are willing to spend big on maintaining national publishing programs. As younger people will be extpected to be functionally bi- or tri-lingual, maintaining cultural identity gets to be a big obsession.
When travelling through former Yugoslavia each part had adopted official languages that they needed to promote and disseminate, and the only way to do that is to encourage as much print and written use as possible. I saw several newly published fiction books in a Croatian bookshop - from memory local authors - with promotional stacks, but also little stacks of foreign language editions in the other [similar but different] Serbian, Macedonian and Slovenian languages.
(yes - I know Macedonian and Slovenian are distinct from Serbo-Croatian)
There’s a scene in a Neal Stephenson novel where a Hungarian character is perusing the magazine stand at an airport. He ponders a copy of a model railroading magazine and contemplates the economics of a language with a readership sufficient that the market can support a monthly full glossy magazine, complete with photographs, on such an obscure topic. (Which I assume Hungarian can’t.)
Not so obscure.
These are obscure.
Yes, this is true, and is worth underlining.
Since Luxembourgish has been mentioned a couple of times, here’s a little history to illustrate.
Luxembourg, as a nation, spent centuries being handed back and forth between its larger neighbors essentially as a prize property — exchanged in a deal, won in a war, whatever; we were part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, we were held by the Frankish Burgundians, by the German Hapsburgs, briefly by the Spanish Empire, and on and on. Being a tiny territory prone to external influence, the language evolved similarly; it has a recognizably German foundation, but it’s also incorporated elements of Dutch and French (and a touch of Romanian, oddly), with a few local quirks of its own (e.g. three different words for butterfly, depending on where you are in the country, which are not related to the French, German, or Dutch words). It was declared an autonomous region in the second half of the 1800s, but was still “owned” by outside royals.
In any case, in the political uncertainty after WWI, Luxembourg took advantage of the situation to formally assert its full independence, and in service to this new nationalism the language of Luxembourgish was officially declared. Prior to that, the typical Luxembourger would probably have regarded the tongue they spoke as a dialect of German, albeit a more distant cousin than the dialect spoken in, say, Köln (though of course there are Kölsch speakers who might argue this). Now, though, there was a conscious effort to actually write down and regularize Luxembourgish spelling and grammar. This was a political project of the government; the people themselves just kept speaking whatever they were already speaking and didn’t worry too much about the national agenda.
Then WWII started, and the Germans blitzed in, rolling over Luxembourg and claiming it for themselves in a matter of hours. One of the first things they did was declare Luxembourgish verboten — it’s not a real language, you’re all German, stop speaking that mutant dialect, it makes you sound like drunk donkeys, you must speak German correctly. Street signs were replaced, newspapers were converted or closed outright, and so on.
After the war, when the Germans were ousted and Luxembourg liberated, the status of Luxembourgish was again asserted, and this time the effort had much greater buy-in from the wider population. It was recognized that this was not just a matter of day-to-day convenience, it was a true question of identity; Germany had attempted to eliminate Luxembourg as an independent territory by imposing the German language and erasing the Luxembourgish “variation” entirely as improper. The existential trauma of this near-disaster triggered a backlash, and nearly everyone was all-in on the need to develop and support Luxembourgish as a fully recognized language in its own right. After years of debate and uncertainty, a formal orthography was approved and adopted in 1946; amendments would follow, but this was a major step. It allowed writers to begin creating and publishing material in “true” Luxembourgish, periodicals to be circulated, government documents to be issued.
Now, if you are a child in the Luxembourg’s school system, your first couple of years are taught exclusively in Luxembourgish. French and German are introduced during the elementary phase, and English (and another elective) are taught during the secondary phase. Something like three-quarters of the population can speak Luxembourgish, many with native-equivalent fluency, many as part of the naturalization process, which requires one to become familiar with the language. The government financially supports the writing of books (novels, poetry, nonfiction). Political parties that occasionally try to save money by issuing campaign materials only in French suffer blowback and don’t do well in national elections.
This is not to say the language is now concretely established and on a secure path into the future. Just the opposite. The fact that Luxembourg is small and highly dependent on an influx of immigrants means that the adoption of Luxembourgish as a second or third (or fourth) language by naturalized citizens is necessarily not a true reflection of the language’s use, because these immigrants lack the comfort of native-level fluency; people learn enough to get the passport, and then retreat to more familiar languages in their day-to-day. The government’s statistics on “who is a speaker” are almost certainly inflated by this effect.
The pressure from French, especially, continues; a couple of years ago there was a major controversy when the country’s central airport announced their overhead announcements would be made only in French and English, and the use of Luxembourgish would cease. This is defensible as a matter of practical efficiency: why bother taking time on the speaker system with words maybe one person in a thousand passing through will actually understand? There was (and is) vociferous argument, but the situation has not changed. It might seem like a silly thing to want, but the national memory is still fresh regarding the agenda of the Nazi invasion: erase the language, and erase the people.
So — having a library full of books in your own language is not just a question of practicality, in terms of access to information. It is a fundamental statement of identity: we exist.
And this explains the sometimes rather irritated reactions from European dopers to the OP’s question, which comes across as Anglo-American “Your tiny languages are not to be taken seriously, English rules” cultural imperialism. I’m sure the OP didn’t mean it that way, but it’s easy to perceive it as such.
Frivolous side note: in the days when the Eurovision Song Contest was limited to the official language(s) of each country, there was some resentment that the Luxembourg entry gave the French record companies an extra entry (along with Monaco, Belgium every other year and Switzerland most years).
IIRC that’s the national motto:
That rule was one of the reasons why Ireland had a streak winning the contest in that era - they were allowed to sing in English, which had the advantage that more people across Europe would understand the lyrics. Strangely, the UK didn’t manage to capitalise on this quite as well.
Indeed. I was in the city center for dinner last night and happen to have walked past the landmark building where the motto is famously painted (image linked from that same wiki article).
Always makes me happy to see it.
While the OP seems to be aimed at minor languages, Japanese and Taiwanese libraries have very small English sections and even smaller ones in other languages.
I attempted to donate some of my English books to an English library before, but they declined any donations.
My wife had a large number of Japanese books she used for her research and a university library in Taiwan gladly took them.
Okay, you’ve dropped two little asides that have me curious about the history of Luxembourg. If it’s not too much of a hijack, how is it that a small Benelux country acquired a Portuguese-speaking community? (Seat of the pants guess: wine merchants). And what historical quirk resulted in Luxembourgish being influenced by Romanian, of all languages? Please fight my ignorance!
Immigrants, started in the 19th Century but really took off after 1960. There is even a Wikiarticle about Portuguese in Luxemburg.
ETA: The list of notable people is funny: 25 footballers, one racing driver, one actor, one politician, one Grand Duchess.
Good gracious. A community of 151,000 in a country of only 661,000 is a pretty sizable minority.
This thread made me realize I haven’t been to a public library in more than 25 years. I used to skip school to go read in the Biblioteca Mariano Moreno about 15 minutes in a bus from my home, in fact I read The Lord of the Rings there (in the original Spanish)
Then came the internet and I started reading for free by more, ahem, “creative” means and I never went back.
At that point (1992 - 1996) there were a few books in English but they were very small percentage of the total, the books in Spanish where a good mix of Argentinian, Latin American and Spanish authors in Spanish, with translated books from other languages.
I remember reading The Vimcomte of Bragelonne (First and only time I cried in a public library), Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon (I thought it would be a fantasy book, but read it anyway), and of course El Señor de los Anillos.
All in Spanish since I didn’t understand enough English at that time.
You win this thread! 
Which brings to mind the question - are there, thanks to the internet, a lot of unauthorized or unofficial translations floating around? I know the originals are out there. I recall a bit about Harlan Ellison even back in the late 90’s complaining about all his works - English - being traded online. If people go through the trouble of transcribing English (or other) literature, presumably some will also translate.
I think the point was that though there was a decent number (presumably) of Hungarian speaking model railroad afficionados, they were not a big enough market to support the cost of monthly production of a glossy magazine - due to the overall size of Hungarian-speaking population. (And also the subtraction of those who could read English and so buy the English magazine instead). I haven’t looked lately, but I think there are several English model railroad magazines - or used to be. Magazines are a dying breed, like print newspapers.
Some but not much more, when I still read translated books from the internet I always read official translations that had been scanned, OCRed and uploaded by caritative souls.