The cardboard mountain has been gathered by collectors called Cartoneros who comb the streets of the Argentine capital Buenos Aires every night searching for discarded milk cartons and cardboard flour or potato chip packaging.

Cucurto and his co-workers turn the cardboard into book covers for their publishing company. “We're not elitist,” says the 36-year-old who is an author in his own right. “We print books we like. It might be a classic, a contemporary piece of literature or a text written by a teenager for the first time.”

Cucurto founded the cardboard book publishing company Eloisa Cartonera in 2003 together with his poet friend Fabian Casas. Eloisa is the name of a former flame, explains Cucurto. “Unfortunately nothing came of it. She only came to our offices once.”

However, the name did remain. The office and sales room are located in the poor district of La Boca, just one block away from Bonbonera football stadium where Diego Maradona once played with the Boca Juniors soccer team. “I'm not actually a Boca Juniors fan,” says Cucurto, “but we feel welcome here in the area.”

Eloisa Cartonera is a collective. Every weekend its 11 staff members share the income earned from book sales. Many of them are from La Boca and were unemployed, just like 47-year-old Roberto Caceres, who today is one of the most active authors the publishing house has. “I was lucky because Cucurto liked what I had written,” he says.

Many of Buenos Aires' Cartoneros also benefit from the cardboard book publishing company. Instead of the usual 20 cents they receive per kilogram of paper, Eloisa Cartonera pays them 25 cents for each sheet of cardboard they bring in.

But the company does not consider itself a self-help project. The demand for cardboard books, each of which has been hand-decorated in luminous colors, is enormous. Tourists are especially fond of buying the books as souvenirs but Argentine bookshops are also stocking their shelves with cardboard books because they are comparatively cheap.

A conventional hardback book costs between 15 and 30 U.S. dollars but the cardboard variety costs just three dollars. Eloisa mainly prints texts by its own “house” authors and must obtain publishing rights for anything else, however, most authors allow Eloisa to print their work in return for a donation.

The company does not receive any charity and relies totally on its own income. “We make 3,000 books a day but we still can't keep up with demand,” says Cucurto. “I hardly have any chance to write. Only at night or riding the bus do I get some time.”

In the meantime the idea has taken off elsewhere. “According to my information there are at least 30 other cardboard book publishers in Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador and Uruguay,” says Johana Kunin. The 28-year-old Argentine anthropologist is researching cardboard book publishers.

“They're quite successful but of course they have problems to contend with. Staff members often need a second job to make ends meet and many cardboard book publishers are not accepted by the literature scenes in their own countries,” says Kunin.

Miguel Angel Meza can confirm that. Meza heads up the Paraguayan cardboard book company Mnurukujarami Kartonera. “The idea is just in its initial stage. We want to expand and improve and we have plenty of ideas.” Meza's company intends to bring out CD covers and attend book fairs in future.

The cardboard book concept has even begun to spread beyond Latin America. German publisher Timo Berger has known Washington Cucurto since he began Eloisa Cartonera. Berger translates texts, mediates with authors and provides useful contacts for the company. Many of his own literary works have been published in cardboard format, both in Spanish and German. “In the beginning I treated it as an experiment. I just couldn't imagine how dynamic it would go on to be.”

In the meantime the 35-year-old has founded his own cardboard book publishing company in Germany called PapperLaPapp. At the moment he only sells finished books produced by his business partners in Latin America. Berger is not planning to create any cardboard books himself. “There are no Cartoneros in Germany, just bottle collectors. It would be a challenge to create a bottle publishing company but it wouldn't be quite the same.”