Open Books has specialized in Russian literature in translation from its early years on, with works by various authors such as Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Rybakov, Strugatsky, Bakhtin, Pasternak, Chernyshevsky, Gorky, Ostrovsky and Aitmatov, to name only a few.

Among them was also the revolutionary and futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), whose poems were first translated into Korean by Open Books as early as 1989. In 1993, Open Books collected and edited a large selection of his poems in a 3-volume set.