The M. M. Bakhtin’s work on speech genres is wellknown. However this problem was examined by other outstanding Russian scholar A. A. Reformatskiy in his book «Technical editing of a book. Theory and method of work» published in 1933 (Bakhtin’s work was written twenty years later). Unlike Bakhtin Reformatskiy studied only a part of genres – genres of books – but his classification was more detailed and fixed main features of different genres depending on the aims of their publication.