 Short stories and sketches in Malay have been recorded in Indonesia since the 1870s, and a short story collection — H. Kommer's Warna Sari — was published in 1912. These early stories used vernacular Malay and were often humourous or derived from fairy tales or detective fiction. Short story-writing developed further in the 1920s and 1930s, when short stories and sketches in a more formal register of Malay were widely published in such magazines as Pandji Poestaka and Poedjangga Baroe. The first collection of short stories in the Indonesian literary canon, Mohammad Kasim's Teman Doedoek, was published by Balai Pustaka in 1937. This collection was a commercial success, selling 4,000 copies by 1941.
