Twenty Kilos for Dumas

Hello. Let's start with a puzzle that sounds made up today. You want a novel by Alexandre Dumas. It's published, it's printed, the print run is huge, and you can't buy it. Not for any money. It simply isn't in the shop. But there is another way. Collect twenty kilograms of old paper, carry it to a collection point, get a coupon, and only then is the book yours.

This isn't a parable. It worked in the Soviet Union for almost twenty years.

It all began in nineteen seventy-four. The country was badly short of paper pulp, and its citizens were short of books. Good literature, especially translated fiction, was a scarce prize. People put their names on waiting lists for it and paid several times the price. Then someone very clever joined the two shortages into one scheme. For handing in waste paper, a person got no money, because money settled nothing here. They got a coupon. The coupons piled up, and you could spend them on a book that wasn't for sale in ordinary shops.

The first two novels in the series were "Queen Margot" by Dumas and "The Woman in White" by Wilkie Collins. The choice was precise, almost cruel. Not philosophy, not poetry, but the most tempting reading there is, the kind you swallow in two nights. And the whole country went off to hand in paper.

The rate changed over time, but the one people quoted most was this: twenty kilograms for one book. A two-volume set took forty. If you've never lifted twenty kilograms of paper, picture a stack of newspapers about waist-high on a grown adult, tied tight with string. You had to gather it, bind it, and haul it there. And this is where it gets to the part everyone who lived through it remembers.

Whole families collected. Nothing was thrown away: newspapers, magazines, old exercise books, packaging, envelopes. Neighbours gave their bundles to whoever wasn't too lazy to carry them. Schoolchildren went from flat to flat in whole squads. Schools had their own collection quotas, and classes competed against each other. There were queues at the collection points, and in the queues there were negotiations, swaps and small dramas. The attendant with the scales was a nearly magical figure in this system. And the scales, it must be said, sometimes showed something other than what was really there.

Over the years until nineteen ninety-one, this "waste-paper series" produced about ninety titles. Dumas, Stendhal, Cooper, Druon, Agatha Christie. Whole home libraries were built from books paid for with old newspapers. Many of those volumes still sit on the shelves of people's parents, and you can spot them by the spine.

And now, the interesting part. Let's look at what this really was.

You could decide it was a great environmental programme: a country that got there first, collecting recyclables from its own people. It sounds lovely, but it isn't true. There was no concern for the planet here at all. There was a shortage of raw material for the pulp and paper industry, and there was a shortage of books. The state simply found a currency that people had in surplus: old paper.

And still, something bigger came out of it than anyone planned. A whole generation grew up with a firm piece of knowledge that was never spoken aloud but stuck for good: used paper isn't rubbish. It's a resource with a price, and a very concrete one, paid in novels, adventures, and other people's lives between two covers. A child dragging a bundle of newspapers across a courtyard knew exactly what it was for. You don't have to explain to that child why to sort waste. They learned it long ago, just for a different reason.

The system ended along with the country. Books stopped being scarce, you could simply buy them, and waste paper instantly lost its remarkable buying power. The collection points closed. The newspapers went to the landfill.

Today we are learning to sort our waste again, and this odd experience is worth remembering. It says something not very comfortable, but useful. People will bother with rubbish not when they're told it's the right thing to do, but when there's something in it they really want. In nineteen seventy-four, that something was Dumas.

So if someone in your family carefully stacks newspapers into a neat pile, for reasons of their own, don't rush to laugh. Maybe they're still saving up for "Queen Margot."

If you leave with more questions than you came with, that was the idea. The answers and the map live at moygid dot online.