[6][7] According to testimony before the U.S. Congress by Trachtenberg, in addition to his initial $50,000 investment, Heller continually made up losses incurred by International Publishers during its first 15 years.

[8] In a letter dated June 1924 from the party's head Literature Department, Nicholas Dozenberg cautioned Trachtenberg that Charles H. Kerr & Co. of Chicago had already published many standard titles by Karl Marx, thus limiting the prospects of successful new editions of the same works.

[8] Instead, Dozenberg encouraged Trachtenberg to concentrate on "books not yet published in English written by popular Russian writers like Lenin, Zinoviev, Radek, and others.

[9] The Book Union first offered an anthology entitled Proletarian Literature in the United States, nearly 400 pages long and edited by current or future editors of The New Masses: Michael Gold, Granville Hicks, Joseph North,[10] and others.

[9] The Book Union collected a $1 annual fee from its members, who then received a discounted volume in the mail each month.

Committee members grilled Tractenberg on his own history, the sources of funding behind International Publishers, and the company's relationship to the Communist Party.

During the 1920s, International Publishers produced the first English-language editions of important works on Marxist theory by Karl Kautsky (Foundations of Christianity, 1925; Are the Jews a Race?

1926), Nikolai Bukharin (Historical Materialism, 1925, The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, 1927; Imperialism and World Economy, 1929); and Joseph Stalin (Leninism, 1928).

[19] International Publishers was an early reissuer of John Reed's legendary chronicle of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World.