Chapter 317 Price Of Paper

Alexander never knew exactly how the individual paper sheets were bound together to form books, notebooks, and such

And thus his interest was piqued at Azijak's request.

"Then lead the way," Alexander hence agreed to Azijak's invitation and was led to another large shed, located right next to the sheet-forming workshop.

"Please my lord," As they approached it, Azijak stood at the door and gestured for Alexander to enter inside first. to which Alexander complied with a light smile.

Inside Alexander could see the whole operation going on at full speed ahead, as a large team of women, were hard at work.

The first team would take the dried sheets and cut them into appropriate sizes, mostly into A3 and A4 sizes from the original A2, using knives and rulers, and then pass them to the next team.

This team consisted of a group of women sitting facing each other with a row of tables in between.

One row was seen stacking the fresh dried pages into a neat pile, then punching holes one at the top and one at the bottom of the papers using a special hammer and chisel.

After this, they would pass these punched stacks forward to the opposite row, where the women there would bind these papers by passing a string through the top hole and bringing them up from the bottom, and repeating this procedure a few times, until the string was tightly wound to the papers, after which they would tie the string ends with a knot.

This stack of paper would sometimes be used as is, with the top few pages acting as the cover page.

While at other times, for things like rosters and diaries, a hardback cover would need to be placed.

To do this, the bound paper stacks would be taken to another station, and then using glue, made mostly from animal fat like deer, a hard paperback, or even a leather covering would be installed over the thin paper, protecting it and giving it a better finish.

"Azijak, how many women work here?" Alexander had noticed up until now the majority of the paper plant was run by female workers.

"Here, about sixty. In total about a thousand my lord." Azijak seemed to know the number by heart.

And then, mistakenly assuming that Alexander was criticizing him for employing women in the workplace, he grumbled a bit to him, "The others had taken all the good men before me, so I could only get the women. If he had not, we would not have the hands to meet the higher demands."

The others here of course referred to the heads of the other workshops and in this way, he hoped to show that he was circumstantially forced to employ these women in the workforce.

Alexander was of course not blaming him, in fact, he was always glad to see more women representation in the labor pool.

Hence Azijak was pleasantly surprised to hear Alexander praise, "Mmm, you did well. Papermaking requires not much hard labor. So, women are perfect for this. Employ more if you need."

"I...I will my lord. Of course, I will." Azijak stammered a bit in his haste to reply, as he clenched his fist in relief and happiness.

"Mnnmm, so many paper sheets can you make?" Alexander then moved on to the next topic, now interested to know his production capacity.

"About hundred thousand (100,000) sheets of paper a day my lord," Azijak puffed up his chest as he said so, feeling the number to be astronomical.

And then, to show off his men's productivity, he further added, "Each of my men can make one thousand (1,000) sheets per day of that A2 size paper my lord gave the dimensions to."

An A2 page was round about 40 x 60 cm in dimensions, and to be able to produce a hundred of them an hour, or around 1 and a half of it per minute might sound impressive to someone who had no idea about the scale of demand for the product, but for someone like Alexander, he could only spookily comment in his heart with two words, 'So low.'

For some context, a modern American used around 200 kgs of paper per year, which came to 28 such A2 paper sheets a day.

And if such a value was to be placed on Zanzan with its current population of hundred and fifty thousand (150,000), the daily need would be 4 million sheets of paper or 40 times the current capacity.

Alexander could not help lampoon at this realization, though, to be honest, these numbers were not totally unexpected for him.

Alexander knew that paper had spread to Europe by the 1300s, but it was not before the advent of industrialization, that paper was made available to the masses.

The evidence of this could be found in that many of the books around this time were made from a mixture of paper and vellum, which was processed cow skin that was soft to the touch and thin, used because the latter was not as expensive as paper.

And thus the Hollywood troupe of noble lords and ladies crumpling up and throwing a paper away just because of a small mistake was a blatant historical inaccuracy.

They would have never been such a wastrel in real life, as in actuality, rag paper, which lasted quite a long time would be regularly recycled and when written on it, typically the writings on it would be really small, as the writer would want to maximize the space provided to him.

"100,000 sheets of paper is not bad, Keep up the good work," Alexander's said so in an anemic tone, his reaction being much milder than what Azijak had expected.

This deflated the papermaker a bit, thinking Alexander was not pleased with the numbers.

But Azijak did not have time to swim in these thoughts as Alexander then suddenly asked him a seemingly out-of-the-blue question. "How much firewood do we use every day?"

"Ummm, about ten tons (10 tons) my lord," Azijak answered with a slight confusion in his voice.

He was not sure what Alexnader's reason for asking this was.

The reason for Alexander asking this was because he was trying to estimate his cost of paper.

Up until now, Alexander had been happy to dump ropals into this paper plant without going into all the maths, but now that everything seemed to have settled, and the workshops were all operating at full capacity, he felt it was time to do so.

Alexander first calculated that on average the daily wage of the thousand (1,000) workers was 6 ropals, with some being paid more and some less.

Of course, Alexander made sure to include the food, housing, and clothing costs within them, so the workers did not actually receive the whole 7 ropals in raw coins.

But, in all, according to Alexander the workers needed 7 ropals worth of wages and materials every day to work properly.

Then there were the setup costs, which included all the tables, chairs, large vats to boil the pulp, stirrers, etc. the list could go on.

In fairness, all these things were relatively cheap compared to the running costs, and so Alexander decided not to be too pedantic and assume it to be zero.

Next, came the raw materials, which were breaches and water.

They cost nothing.

And lastly, there was the firewood that was used to boil water to cook the pulp.

Taking Azijak's number of 10 tons of firewood, fuel came to a thousand (1,000) ropals a day.

So, in total, Alexander would spend eight thousand (8,000) ropals a day to maintain this paper plant, which gave him a production cost of 12.5 sheets of paper per ropal.

That meant that a person could buy a day's meal at 2 ropals or get just 25 sheets of A2 paper.

Or to convert it into A4 sheets, 100 sheets of double A paper.

This was prohibitively expensive, as, if converted into US dollars, while assuming the median income of 1,800 ropals was equivalent to the US median income of 70,000, the 100 A4 papers would cost around 40 dollars.

Whereas one would be able to get 500 pages of the stuff for less than a tenner, making this handmade stuff more than 20 times more expensive than the machine-produced one.

And this was not even mentioning the higher quality of the latter.

For while the modern paper was smooth as a baby's bottom to the touch, Alexander's handmade paper was rough and coarse, like the mullet paper that was used to wrap books or used to make paper grocery bags.

And there were two reasons for this discrepancy in quality.

One was simply because a machine was simply more precise, able to shred the wooden fibers to a much finer pulp, and the second because the workers under Alexander were still new to their job, being only around a month old and still learning how to get the perfect amount of wood pulp from onto the sieve.

This was also why the A2 paper they produced was much thicker than the machine-produced ones from Alexander's previous life, weighing in around 25 to 30 grams as compared to the machine-made 20 grams.

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