The first collection of tales “The Malachite Casket” was published by the Sverdlovsk Regional State Publishing House when the author, Pavel Petrovich Bazhov, turned 60 years old, in 1939. It took a long time to prepare the book — the process started in 1938. During the work on the publication, Bazhov completed several more tales.

As a result, there were four different first editions of the “Malachite Casket”: the author’s or jubilee version, which is housed in the museum, the print edition and two collector’s versions.

The author’s copy was presented to Pavel Petrovich at his birthday celebration: it was a book with a blue binding and a beige bas-relief depicting Grandfather Slyshko on Dumnaya Hill. There is no publishing details page, only ten tales, and each is decorated with an illustration by the artist Alexander Kudrin. When the book was presented, it was symbolically placed in a casket — that box has also been preserved.

The writer’s daughter Ariadna remembered the moment when the book was presented very well.

The mass-produced version was printed in beige and brown binding, and it contained 14 tales and two author’s notes: “On the Features of Speech of the Region and the Narrator” and “Explanations of Certain Words, Concepts and Expressions Found in the Tales”.

The Sverdlovsk Publishing House collaborated with masters of a lapidary factory to create the collector’s edition books for two exhibitions. One was for the international exposition “The World of Tomorrow”, which was held in New York in 1939. The second one was for the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow. The publication looked majestic. It was “a leather-bound book, with a beautiful bas-relief, bordered with a frame of polished malachite… The binding featured a malachite medallion with a silver lizard crawling on it, decorated with small rubies and chrysolites.”

The American copy never returned back to the USSR.