The Buchmafia Story

Monday, eight a.m., Frankfurt-Bockenheim. Ruth is reading in the bath. It’s the only warm spot in the flat.

The welfare office sent her the book “for mental fitness”. Price: 35 marks.

Ruth: The thing won’t sink.

Books don’t float. Ruth calls Selma and Ansgar over.

Selma: Foamed paper. There’s more air in here than book.

Nuri: The bestseller says “Field V: 2.8”. What is that?

Meanwhile, at the Trust’s mainframe, Nuri finds a strange number.

The four meet at Egon’s petrol station. Egon has a car lift.

Ansgar keeps him talking. The others put the book under the lift.

Four centimetres shrink to barely one and a half. That matches the 2.8 in the Register.

Nuri: They pump every book full of air.

Noon at the Trust. The porter holds every ID upside down: he can’t read.

Ruth: Lift maintenance. Your paternoster is stuck.

The job interview with the chief editor turns into a red-pencil duel.

A capsule arrives by pneumatic post from Holzschliff’s mill.

Ansgar: “Sheet four is in the safe.” Signed: Holzschliff.

Along the way, Ansgar saves a sentence the cartel wanted to delete:

§ 14 (3): Books with defects are exempt from fixed pricing.

Remember this sentence.

In the evening the crew prints honest paperbacks in Egon’s cellar: thin, glued and forbidden.

Nuri: One costs us 1.20 marks. The Trust charges 35.

Night, 10:40 p.m. Holzschliff’s paper mill by the canal. This is where the air paper is made.

Ruth worked in this mill for sixteen years. She knows where the valves are.

The machine is already running honest paper. Then Holzschliff walks in.

Holzschliff: I don’t read, my boy. I weigh.

Ansgar: “My boy” doesn’t work for four people.

Holzschliff: Wendt, you’re fired. As of today.

Nuri: It’s past midnight. So as of yesterday.

The gate comes down. A jump onto a barge.

Tuesday, half past five. The barge drifts into the city.

Selma: Our name: the Remainders. Unsellable, return to sender.

Ruth: Tomorrow night we get sheet four.

The plan lies in the sentence Ansgar saved: books with defects have no fixed price.

One “defective copy” stamp, and 35 marks turns into “price at the seller’s discretion”.

For a single book it’s not worth it. For a whole print run it is.

11:41 p.m., the back yard of an antiquarian bookshop. One guard, three spotlights and a crate.

Ruth: Talk to each other. Nobody gets past the fence alone.

Inside the crate: a proof of the secret cost sheet.

But it’s printed on self-destructing paper. In an hour it will be dust.

Ansgar: We need a sheet that lasts.

1:12 a.m., Colophon 7, the cartel’s print works. Tonight the press belongs to the crew.

Selma: That’s a defective copy.

The press is running. Every book gets the stamp.

Nuri: Now it’s a print run.

3:05 a.m., the archive. Ruth cracks the safe by ear.

The safe only holds carbon copies. The real sheet four was in the crate from the back yard all along.

Under the lamp: real paper, real numbers. Production 1.40 marks, shop price 35.

Ansgar: That’s not a cost sheet. That’s a confession.

5:40 a.m. Nuri switches the lights to green, Selma listens in on the police radio. Out of town.

Six a.m., Bockenheim: stamped books for 3.80 marks.

Selma: Nobody asks why. Everyone asks for more.

Nuri: As if that changes anything.

At the telex, Holzschliff measures the paper.

The Bockenheim Gazette · Special Edition

Price at Discretion

Books with a defect stamp are turning up all over the country, for 3.80 marks. The Trust is holding crisis meetings.

A spokesman would only say the incident is being investigated.

According to a leaked sheet, a hardcover costs 1.40 marks to make. In the shop it costs 35.

Holzschliff: Forget paper!

That same morning he writes to all his print works.

Internal memo · Not for publication

A book can take a stamp. So we take away its body: readers only get a licence, and licences expire.

signed, Holzschliff

And the old contracts? — H.

Fifteen years later

Holzschliff kept his word. Hardly any books are printed on paper now.

And nobody buys them any more. People rent them, as e-books.

Every e-book hangs off the Trust’s World Register. Every night at 2:59 it takes back whatever has expired.

The 3.80 paperback is gone too. All it says now is “not available”.

The Register gets its data by radio. The transmitter stands at the West Telecom Office.

11:38 p.m. The crew rolls through the gate in a repair truck.

The Remainders have got older. Not better behaved.

Selma: I can’t forge what nobody can touch.

This time Nuri leads.

Nuri: I helped build that Register. Then they deleted me.

12:31 a.m., the cable cellar. The terms say: e-books can’t have defects. So no stamp either.

Ansgar: And my own initials are underneath.

Selma: Then our plan is dead.

The back door: the category “transmission damage”.

The teleprinter reports everything to Frankfurt. Nuri feeds it 900 identical lines.

On the tape of the board meeting: for every e-book, the Trust pays the rights holders five marks.

Nuri: At 99 pfennigs, they lose 4.01 marks. Every time.

A book with transmission damage gets cheaper. So the crew doesn’t need to steal a thing. They just need to free the price, and everyone has to notice.

2:17 a.m., the transmitter hall. The crew puts the change on the airwaves. The clock ticks towards 2:59.

At 2:59 the Register fetches the change by itself. Eleven minutes later every book on 400,000 devices costs 99 pfennigs.

Nuri: Their best messenger is their own deletion service.

3:12 a.m., the main post office. Four people in a phone box for one.

Nuri: It’s not theft. There’s a price on it.

Ruth: We didn’t break a thing. That’s what they’ll never believe.

Quarter past six. The payout receipt is 24 metres long. At the end it just says: “Change roll”.

Ansgar: He always weighed everything. Now he’s holding something that weighs nothing, and it has cost him everything.

The Bockenheim Gazette · Special Edition

Four Marks, One Pfennig

The Trust is insolvent. The board calls it transmission damage.

The Trust is bankrupt. One question remains: why did the old cards still exist at all?

And now? For three weeks, Radio Bockenheim has been secretly broadcasting after midnight.

At 12:30 a.m. it plays the national anthem. After that, a husky voice on 1548 kilohertz reads out lists of banned books.

The Trust sends tracking vans all over town. But every night the signal jumps three frequencies.

Every night at 11:58 someone loads the tape. The note beside it just says:

— H.

To be continued