From communist works to a comic book, thousands of titles banned by Turkey over the decades have been taken off the restricted list as part of a government reform.
In July, the parliament adopted a bill stipulating that any decision taken before 2012 to block the sale and distribution of a published work would be voided if no court chose to confirm the ruling within six months.
The deadline came and went on Saturday and no such judicial decisions were recorded, the head of Turkey's TYB publisher's union, Metin Celal Zeynioglu, said. City prosecutor Kursat Kayral had announced last month that he would let lapse every ban in his jurisdiction, a decision that cleared 453 books and 645 periodicals in that area alone.
Among them were several communist works including the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as writings by Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin and Russia's revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin.
Others included a comic book, an atlas, a report on the state of human rights in Turkey and an essay on the Kurds.
But the books under Kayral's jurisdiction were only a fraction of all the titles affected, as many as 23,000 works according to Zeynioglu, who said the number came from the justice ministry.