Russian booklovers’ woes

Press, 15 October 1976, Page 12

Russian booklovers’ woes

In the West you can buy books freely — if you have the money. In Russia books are subsidised and cheap — but the Russians, eager readers, can seldom get the books they want, even when these are officially approved for publication. Queueing all night to buy a new book comes as naturally to a Russian booklover as walking for miles in the woods does to a Russian mushroom-picker. New books are. eagerly lapped up partly because old ones are so hard to come by. It is illegal to sell a second-hand book at more than its original price. This law does not actually prevent sharp guys from making big blackmarket profits, but it does create a shortage of good secondhand bookshops. To help book-lovers and at the same time to exploit their passion, a “books for waste paper” scheme was

introduced some time ago in the major cities. Anybody who turns in 20 kilograms of waste paper gets a voucher giving him priority in the purchase of new books. It sounds a good scheme and one half of it seems to be working well: 93,000 tons of waste- paper were brought in last year. But Moscow’s “Literaturnaya Gazeta” has received many complaints from its readers, who had found the collecting points closed after lugging bundles of waste paper for long distances, had been told that no vouchers were available, or simply found that the shops did not have the books they had sweated to obtain. The Russian book-lover, however, is made of sterner stuff than the Russian shopper for other things. The victims of the waste paper scheme are reported to be thinking of forming an unofficial association to fight for their rights.