Fascinating history of Lithuanian 🇱🇹 smugglers of... books 📖
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lithuanian-book-smugglers
@kravietz A colleague of mine once bought British books on esotericism to Poland during the Soviet Union. He paid for them with illegally mined amber. XD
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@werekat I remember how music cassettes were smuggled during these times and it was awesome - one person could bring an Iron Maiden cassette from UK to Poland, then it was immediately replicated into thousands of copies and distributed in Poland, then someone took it on train to USSR, then the same process was repeated there - all that was obviously illegal, but in late 80's nobody cared.
@kravietz Absolutely. Quite a bit of my thesis is about the continuation of that process in the 1990s - about the legalization of book piracy.