Minority-language books in Kazan
If you visit Kazan and want to buy books in Tatar, the place to go is the intersection of Bauman (ул. Баумана) and Astronimičeskaja (ул. Астрономическая) streets. It’s unassuming from the outside, but if you open the door and walk down a flight of stairs, you’ll encounter a large selection of Tatar poetry, prose, school textbooks and dictionaries. There are unfortunately no textbooks (on both my 2008 and 2011 visits, the shopkeeper seemed annoyed that I even asked), but as pretty much every Tatar textbook can be found online at pirated linguistics books sites, that’s not a major problem.
The shop also sells some minority-language publications from surrounding regions. For Mari, I was able to buy two of the three volumes of Sergei Chavain’s complete works. Chuvash is represented mainly by dictionaries and cookbooks. Considerably more shelf space is dedicated to Bashkir, but as one northern Kipchak language is frustrating enough for me right now, I didn’t have a detailed look at those offerings.
Not sure what textbooks you were expecting to find, but there simply aren’t any post-secondary Tatar textbooks in print these days. The most recent one, Татар теле, күңелем теле (2011), was a very small printing, with only 500 copies distributed to various Tatar communities around Russia, and it never was available for sale. There hasn’t been a teaching grammar, in Russian or any other language, in probably a decade. The best bet for getting any such books is to talk up the folks at ИЯЛИ or the university– someone will root about their personal stash of books and give you what you need.
That said, I probably stopped by Нур-Маркет weekly while I was in Kazan. The other bookstores are usually worth checking as well, since their smaller Tatar sections sometimes hold surprises– I found one of my missing volumes of Ishaqi’s collected works that way.
One of Sabirov’s self-teaching books has been republished last year. Unfortunately, I saw it for sale only at the Дом Книга on Nevsky prospekt in Saint-Petersburg and have not come across it anywhere in the Middle Volga region. The same publisher had also released (or just reissued) a Bashkir textbook as well. Both cost about 1000 rubles, however, well outside my price range.