35 
The History of the Book in Poland
35 JANET ZMROCZEK
When the Polish King Mieszko I was baptized in 966, his acceptance of Catholicism set the course of Polish cultural history and the development of the Polish book. Evidence suggests that MS books had come to Poland with Christian missionaries from neighbouring countries and farther lands (Ireland and Italy) even before Mieszko’s official conversion. Poles themselves began participating in the development of an indigenous book culture only in the 12th–13th centuries; until this time, books were generally imported from abroad, or created by people from other countries. Annals and chronicles recording Polish history may have been written as early as the 10th century, but the first surviving example is the 12th-century Rocznik Świętokrzyski, now held by the National Library of Poland in Warsaw.
As Poles travelled more frequently to study at Italian and French universities and more monasteries were established on Polish soil, a greater interest in writing led to the development in the 13th century of a wider network of scriptoria, attracting native Polish clergy. The scriptoria in Silesia were particularly prolific, producing a number of richly illuminated MSS, including the oldest surviving MS containing a full sentence in Polish: The Chronicle of the Cistercian Monastery at Henryków. From the 14th and early 15th centuries, the book began to spread beyond church and court circles, encouraged in part by the beginning of writing in Polish. Important surviving Polish-language MSS of this period include the Sermons from the Holy Cross Mountain Monastery and Psałterz Floriański, a richly illuminated codex containing psalms in Polish, Latin, and German.
Under the Jagiellonian dynasty (1385–1569), Poland, in union with Lithuania, was the largest and most powerful empire in Europe with a truly multi-ethnic population. It encompassed the Korona (Poland proper) as well as Lithuania, Orthodox Ruthenia, and Lutheran Prussia. Thus, German, Lithuanian, Ruthenian, Yiddish, and other minority languages coexisted with Polish, enabling cross-fertilization between diverse cultures. Political and economic prosperity facilitated patronage of the arts and an interest in books among royalty, magnates, and prosperous townsfolk, which led to a flowering of the art of illumination in the 15th–16th centuries, led by Cracow. The Kodeks Behema, (c.1505–6)—a compilation of statutes, privileges, and laws relating to trade and the guilds of Cracow, illustrated with exquisite miniatures—testifies to this. Cracow, the capital city and a thriving commercial centre, was home to the Akademia Krakowska (precursor of the Jagiellonian University) founded in 1364, where the professors found MS books a vital working tool, which they frequently donated to the Academy’s library.
Printing in Poland began in Cracow, with the arrival of an itinerant Bavarian printer, Kasper Straube, in 1473. Schweipolt Fiol established the second Cracow printing office, subsequently printing the first four books in Cyrillic types (c.1490–91). The first printed text in Polish—daily prayers included in the Statuta Synodalia Episcoporum Wratislaviensium—appeared in 1475 at the Wrocław (Breslau) printing office of Kasper Elyan (c.1435–1486). In the 15th century, there were also printers in Malbork (Jakub Karweyse), Gdańsk (Konrad Baumgarten), and probably Chełmno (the anonymous printer of the sermons of Pope Leo I). However, Polish publishers still often used printers from abroad for more complex commissions, as Polish printers frequently lacked up-to-date types and equipment.
Polish-language printing in Cracow dates from 1503, when the wine merchant Jan Haller established his own printing office, run by the German Kasper Hochfeder. Their Commune Incliti Poloniae Regni Privilegium, a collection of Polish legislation compiled by Jan Łaski (1456–1531) was among the first of c.250 items printed by Haller in twenty years of work. He also owned one of Poland’s oldest paper mills, at Prądnik Czerwony near Cracow, founded c.1493. Other prominent printers of early 16th-century Cracow were Hieronymus Vietor, the Szarffenberg family, Florian Ungler, and Maciej Wirzbięta. Both Ungler and Vietor made important contributions to the development of Polish language and its orthography. Ungler printed the first known book in Polish, Raj duszny (1513), a prayer book translated from Latin. Ungler’s books were richly ornamented and illustrated (e.g. Stefan Falimirz’s herbal O ziołach i o mocy gich (1534) with 550 fine woodcut illustrations). Vietor, initially a printer in Vienna, developed close links with humanist intellectuals there; his printing office in Cracow contributed to the dissemination of humanist thought. He printed works by Desiderius Erasmus and acquired Greek types to print the Greek writings of the Cracow humanists. Hungarians studying at the Akademia Krakowska also worked with Vietor to publish Hungarian grammars, dictionaries, and religious works. In the later 16th century, Jan Januszowski introduced new types and improved printing processes. His Nowy karakter polski (1594), published using his new types, established the rules of Polish orthography. He printed more than 400 titles, including many works by Jan Kochanowski. Wirzbięta printed most of the works of Mikołaj Rej, the first outstanding author writing exclusively in Polish. In the second half of the 16th century, Cracow had twelve printing offices, including one printing Hebraica (see 8). In all, around 4,200 different titles were printed in Poland during the 16th century.
Both Ungler and Maciej Szarffenberg possessed Hebrew types, the latter using them in 1530 to print Phillippus Michael Novenianus’ Elementale Hebraicum. The first Jewish printing house in Poland was founded in Kazimierz near Cracow in 1534 by the Helicz brothers, who learned the craft in Prague. They enjoyed great success until boycotted by their fellow Jews for converting to Christianity. Another early Hebrew printing house dating from 1547 was located in Lublin. Polish Hebrew printers, like Polish Latin printers, always faced competition from printers abroad, particularly in Italy, Bohemia, Germany, and Holland, since the importing of Hebrew books was unrestricted.
As in much of Europe, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation facilitated the spread of literacy and increased demand for print. Printing spread beyond the capital city to small towns and villages where Protestant printers operated presses under the protection of local landowners. In Poland-Lithuania, Lutheranism held sway in the north, whereas Calvinism, antitrinitarianism, and unitarianism took hold amongst the landed gentry, the magnates of Małopolska, the grand duchy of Lithuania, and even Europe’s largest landowners, the Radziwiłłs. At first, Polish-language Protestant literature was printed primarily in Königsberg, where Jan Seklucjan published his New Testament (1551–3) in Polish. The first full text of the Bible in Polish, the Biblia Leopolita (1561)—published by Cracow Catholics, printed by the Szarffenbergs—was lavishly illustrated, but relied on older translations.
Meanwhile, the Polish Calvinists were working on a completely new translation, the Biblia Brzeska (Brest-Litovsk, 1563). The work of some dozen theologians, writers, poets, and translators led by Jan Łaski (1499–1560), it remains one of the great Polish cultural treasures both for its linguistic beauty and its appearance, though most copies were destroyed when Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł returned to the Catholic fold. The Catholics realized that in order for them to participate fully in the polemical debates raging at the time, a more accurate translation, drawing on the most recent research, was required. The result was Jakub Wujek’s bible (Cracow, 1599). For the next three centuries, it was the canonical text of the Polish Bible. In response, other Protestant bibles appeared in the early 17th century, including the Polish Brethren’s New Testament (1606), rigorously translated from the Greek, and the Biblia Gdańska (1632), the canonical text for Polish Protestants. No significant translations of the Bible into Polish appeared thereafter until 1965.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Polish writers, thinkers, and theologians were integrated into mainstream European culture. With Latin as the lingua franca of intellectual life, Poles studied and taught at universities in Italy, France, Switzerland, and Germany; many Protestants sought asylum in Poland, where from 1573 non-Catholics were protected by the state. Publishers in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, The Netherlands, France, and England produced works by Polish writers, many of whom were part of the European intellectual network. For example, Jan Zamoyski, founder of the Akademia Zamoyska, was close to Aldus Manutius in Venice. Several influential works of Polish history (e.g. by Marcin Kromer and Maciej z Miechowa) and treatises on government and politics (e.g. Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski’s De Republica Emendanda and Wawrzyniec Goślicki’s De Optimo Senatore) enjoyed great acclaim throughout Europe. In the century, 724 titles by Polish authors were printed abroad, and in the 17th century more than 550.
By the mid-17th century, disastrous wars with Sweden and Russia, Cossack uprisings, and internal feuding had brought about the demise of Poland-Lithuania’s golden age. Polish printing deteriorated, particularly in the second half of the century, as did cultural, economic, and educational life generally. The victory of the Counter-Reformation stifled much of the open debate that had characterized 16th-century Polish intellectual life. Printing became subject to strict censorship by the Church, which produced indexes of prohibited books; book burning became a public spectacle in Cracow. When Sigismund III moved his capital to Warsaw (1596), Cracow lost its supremacy as a printing centre because the privileges for government printing ceased. When the royal court moved to Warsaw, this privilege passed from the Piotrkowycz family in Cracow to Jan Rossowski, who had been printing in Poznań 1620–24. The Piotrkowycz family eventually donated all their printing equipment to the Akademia Krakowska, which formed its own printing house at the end of the 17th century. Another notable academic printer at this time was the Akademia Zamoyska in Zamość, which benefited from Janus-zowski’s experience and equipment. Itinerant printers profited from the boom in the printing of ephemera, as in the rest of Europe (see 16). A vogue for popular literature also developed, where the quality of the printing mattered little, if at all.
The Enlightenment reached Poland much later than it did western Europe: Polish culture was not revitalized until the 1730s, after the intellectual and institutional stagnation of the previous century. German influences in Gdańsk led to the first learned societies whose aim was to promote the sciences and humanities, and in Toruń, to developments in the study of Polish language and culture. Enlightenment ideas reached Warsaw considerably later, mainly through French influence, though in 1732 Józef Andrzej Załuski announced his intention to form a public library in Warsaw. Poland’s last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, played a pivotal role in the development of intellectual and cultural life via his support for the arts and reform of the state, including the introduction of state control of the educational system with the Commission of National Education. This necessitated an entirely new set of textbooks, since Polish replaced Latin as the language of instruction. New Polish terminology was introduced in mathematics, physics, and grammar; important steps were taken in the codification of the language, which reached fruition with the publication in 1807–14 of Samuel Bogusław Linde’s six-volume dictionary of the Polish language. The press began to play an important role in public life with the magazine Monitor (1765–84), attracting the most significant writers and thinkers of the day. Warsaw supported eleven printing firms in the latter part of the 18th century. The most ambitious were those of Michael Gröll—who arrived in Warsaw in 1759 via Dresden—and Pierre Dufour, a Parisian who established his printing office in 1775 and produced titles in Polish, Hebrew, and Cyrillic. Their work characterized the new trend for simple, cleaner types and a modern design aesthetic enabled by new type foundries, such as that run by Piotr Zawadzki, a printer, publisher, and bookseller in his own right. Gröll also modernized Polish bookselling practice, holding auction sales, publishing fixed-price catalogues of his own publications, and promoting books by reviews. He also marketed Polish books abroad through firms in Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin, and presented translations of Polish writers at the Leipzig book fair.
After 1795, when Poland ceased to be a sovereign state and was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the fate of the Polish book was subject to the vagaries of the occupying powers. The printed word became a force that united Poles living in the tripartite partition with their fellow countrymen who sought asylum abroad, and kept a Polish national identity alive. Inside partitioned Poland, conditions varied. During the early 19th century, within the Russian partition, Wilno (Vilnius) was the most important cultural centre, largely because of the university where Polish Romanticism developed (with Adam Mickiewicz playing a central role). Józef Zawadzki, the leading printer in Polish, Lithuanian, and Hebrew, did much to modernize Polish bookselling and publishing: his authors were paid royalties, and he established a chain of book-shops in other cities. Wilno was also home to the Typographical Society, formed in 1818 to promote reading. This early progressive atmosphere came to an end after the November Uprising of 1823. In Warsaw, from 1801 the Society of the Friends of Science played an invaluable role in promoting academic publishing until its closure in 1831. During the later 19th century, without state support, the Polish School Society and the Mianowski Fund supported publishing both for schools and for research and academic communities. Influential private firms included the Glücksbergs for Polish history and literature, and the Arcts for textbooks, music, children’s books, and, in the 20th century, dictionaries and encyclopaedias. The other major publisher of reference works was Samuel Orgelbrand, whose 28-volume Encyklopedia Powszechna first appeared in 1859–68. Gebethner & Wolff, founded in 1857, was the largest publisher, printer, and bookseller; the firm continued until the Communist authorities closed it in 1960. Among its authors were many of the greatest writers, composers, and historians of the day: Władysław Stanisław Reymont, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Bolesław Prus, Bruckner, and Szymanowski.
A weak economy and intensive Germanization policies subdued the development of Polish cultural life throughout the Austrian partition during the 19th century, though the scope for Polish educational, cultural, and social activities revived after Galicia gained autonomy in 1868, with Cracow and Lvov playing a leading role. Lvov was the site of the Ossoliński Institute; Cracow was home to the Academy of Sciences (founded 1873) and the Jagiellonian University, which regained its Polish identity in the 1870s and thus resumed its role as the centre for academic publishing. Cracow was also at the heart of the revolution in Polish artistic book design encouraged by the Young Poland movement at the turn of the century. The artist and dramatist Stanisław Wyspiański, influenced by William Morris and Walter Crane, sought to bring to his works a unity of form and content that expressed national characteristics with secessionist and symbolist aesthetics. His work with members of the Polish Applied Arts society, Józef Mehoffer and Zenon Przesmycki (founder of the Warsaw journal Chimera), laid the foundation for the modern Polish book arts.
In the Prussian partition, particularly strong pressures to Germanize left no infrastructure for higher education or Polish learned societies until the later 19th century, when the Society for Public Education (1872–9) and the Poznań Society of the Friends of the Sciences (1857–) were formed. Poznań was the regional centre for bookselling, printing, and publishing activity, with many bookshops also operating reading rooms and lending libraries. In Silesia and East Prussia, material was also produced for the Polish-speaking population—chiefly popular and religious literature, calendars, journals, and practical manuals.
Publishing activity both by Polish exile communities of the Great Emigration after the failed Uprising of 1830–31 and by subsequent waves of political refugees was particularly important. The centre of Polish printing abroad was in Paris, where many of the great works of Polish Romanticism were first published. In the period 1831–61, some twenty Polish printers were active in eleven French cities, with significant activity also in the UK, Belgium, and Switzerland. The first Polish-language publications in England were pamphlets of the utopian socialist organization, the Grudziąż Commune in Portsmouth. The first Polish book printed in London, Antoni Malczewski’s Marja (1836), was printed at an English press using Polish types. Stanisław Milewski and Aleksander Napoleon Dybowski opened the first Polish printing office in London in 1837 to publish the journal Republikanin. Although the Polish community in Great Britain was small compared to that in France, it was politically very active, and published prolifically for its size, with output intended for readers in the UK community, émigré communities elsewhere, and sometimes in partitioned Poland itself. Radical Poles in London had close links with other such groups, including the Russians; 1853 saw the founding of a joint printing house for the Polish Democratic Society and Herzen’s Free Russian Press. Between 1891 and 1903, B. A. Jędrzejowski (Józef Kaniowski) ran a printing office for the Polish Socialist Party in London.
When Poland regained independence in 1918, printing, publishing, and cultural life were reinvigorated, but many obstacles remained for the development of reading and book culture. Literacy levels were low (c.33 per cent in 1921) and book prices were high. There were approximately 500 publishers in Poland in 1935; overall production in terms of titles had nearly trebled from c.3,000 (early 20th century) to c.8,700 (1938). Gebethner & Wolff remained the giants of Polish publishing and bookselling, but the Arcts were still influential, as was the Mianowski Fund for the publishing of scholarly works; however, there was still a preponderance of small and medium-sized firms. There were more than 1,000 bookshops, but these were very unevenly distributed, with many in Warsaw and other large cities and few in the eastern and western provinces. In the 1920s–30s, as in the rest of Europe, there was renewed interest in the art of the book in Polish circles. A number of bibliophilic associations emerged to publish journals such as Ex Libris (1917–25) and Silva Rerum (1925–31) and to support printers with artistic ambitions. These included Jakub Mortkowicz, who distinguished himself in the early 20th century as a literary publisher of writers such as Cyprian Norwid and Stefan Żeromski; he was influential in setting up Polish booksellers’ and publishers’ associations. Other producers of acclaimed artistic books were Adam Jerzy Połtawski and Samuel Tyszkiewicz. Tadeusz Makowski and Tytus Czyżewski, both working in Paris, were also renowned Polish illustrators.
World War II resulted in huge losses for Polish culture. Under German occupation, schools and bookshops were closed. Printing houses and libraries came under German administration. Polish publishers were forbidden to operate; three German firms published popular literature, primers, and propaganda in Polish. All Jewish bookshops, libraries, and printing offices were destroyed. Soviet occupiers also removed collections of books and whole libraries from Poland’s eastern territories, sometimes burning them as they went. There was wholesale destruction of books deemed undesirable by the occupiers; booksellers, librarians, and private individuals heroically endeavoured to hide their collections and so preserve the national printed heritage. An underground publishing infrastructure developed, far more prolific than that in other occupied countries. It produced more than 1,500 journals and 1,400 book titles. During the war, Poles in exile and in military camps abroad also published extensively, producing some 15,000 titles overall.
Immediately after World War II, with the publishing, bookselling, and library infrastructure all but destroyed, many prewar publishers sought to satisfy the hunger for books sparked by the government’s education campaign. From 1946, Communist authorities began exerting control, establishing a system of censorship and assuming control over publication rights for the principal twelve classic Polish authors—required reading in schools and thus the largest sellers. Censorship suppressed the publication of works considered harmful to the interests of the Polish People’s Republic, including all mention of Polish–Russian relations and other controversial political issues. In reaction to this, London, sometimes called the Polish capital abroad, became the greatest centre of free Polish publishing. Major London publishing houses included Gryf, Veritas, Oficyna Poetów i Malarzy, the Polish Cultural Foundation, and Odnowa. With print runs as high as 2,000, they flourished until the mid-1970s, when the older generation of Poles began to die and émigré literature lost some of its vitality, though later waves of emigration after the political crises of 1968, 1976, and 1981 led to some revitalization. The Instytut Literacki in Paris was also influential, publishing books and the monthly journal Kultura. At times in postwar Poland, there were harsh punishments for possessing émigré literature, and its importation was strictly prohibited. However, as clandestine publishing took off in the late 1970s, new generations of Poles were able to read émigré classics and other independent publications.
In Poland itself, from the late 1940s, private publishers were branded as petty capitalists with no place in the new popular democracy. In 1949–50, printing, bookselling, and distribution were all brought under state control. Before 1950, approximately 300 private publishers were in operation; by 1955, 97 per cent of books were published by 33 publishers heavily centralized in Warsaw. Despite huge subsidies and record press runs, the needs of the reading public were not met. For example, the thirteen-volume Works of Stalin was published in a print run of 1.8 million, while textbooks and belles-lettres were in short supply. The state bookseller, Dom Książki, bought the entire print run of every book published, so publishers had no interest in whether a title sold well. Books often cost less than the paper on which they were printed, straining available resources. From 1956, the de-Stalinization of Polish cultural policy led to far fewer titles being published—and these in lower print runs—as well as to more realistic publishing programmes and pricing policies.
Polish samizdat publishing: George Orwell’s Folwark Zwierzęcy (Animal Farm; Warsaw, 1979), originally translated by Teresa Jeleńska for the League of Poles Abroad (London, 1947), here illustrated by Andrzej Krauze. The stapled binding is noteworthy. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. (Sol. 244 FC)
Publishers’ and booksellers’ associations were allowed to operate again and seek out new writers. Policies that kept Polish readers isolated from Western ideas and literature were slightly relaxed, although international links were still fostered primarily within the Soviet bloc. However, the 1960s and 1970s were marked by perennial paper shortages and the inability of Polish publishing to satisfy reader demand. Books were often printed on poor paper with low production standards.
In the late 1970s a new phenomenon began to ripple the stagnating waters of Polish state publishing. Samizdat was known to small, select audiences in a number of Communist countries, but in Poland, the phenomenon of independent publishing reached a mass audience. The organizational strengths of Polish oppositional movements such as KOR (the Committee for the Defence of Workers), coupled with assistance from abroad, meant that many independent publishers could work at a professional level, using materials and equipment from official printing houses or smuggled in from abroad. Some titles had press runs reaching more than 100,000. From 1976 to 1989, more than 6,500 books and 4,300 periodical titles were published, printed, and distributed underground. This breaching of the government’s control over the media and publishing played a profound role in the collapse of Communist power.
Since the later 1980s the state monopoly had been progressively weakening, and in May 1990 censorship and state control over publishing were officially lifted. The early 1990s saw a production boom, with thousands of new publishers, many short-lived, making the most of the public’s hunger for popular fiction in translation, cookbooks, practical manuals, etc. The state publishers were gradually privatized or became cooperatives. Polish readers finally had access to the full range of books, including those by previously banned writers or on taboo subjects. In 1999–2003, the number of book titles published per annum hovered around 20,000. In 2003, not surprisingly, the largest number of titles (500) was published by WSiP, a specialist in textbooks, but a further seven firms produced more than 200 titles each. Of the 20,681 book titles appearing in 2003, just under a quarter were translations. The first decade of the 21st century has been characterized by common global trends: retail book chains, Internet bookselling, and growth in electronic publications.
B. Bieńkowska, Książka na przestrzeni dziejów (2005)
—— and H. Chamerska, Books in Poland (1990)
Encyklopedia wiedzy o książce (1972)
J. Sowiński, Polskie drukarstwo (1988)
