[1][2] The magazine "of literature, sciences, arts, industry, current news and fashion" was launched in 1834 by publisher and trader Alexander Filippovich Smirdin who invited the professor of Saint Petersburg University Osip Senkovsky to edit it, for unusually high salary of 15 thousand rubles a year.

[1] Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya became the first ever best-selling magazine in Russia to appeal to the wide middle-class readership, not just the intellectual elite.

The 1830s were the golden age of Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya which in its first two years published works by Alexander Pushkin.

A year later the magazine was acquired by the book trader V.P.Pechatkin who invited Albert Starchevsky as a co-editor.

As Druzhinin retired due to poor health, Pisemsky in November 1860 became BDC's editor-in-chief.