Jacek Woźniakowski – First Steps
At the moment I am starting this introduction, news comes of Jerzy Turowicz’s death. Since his heart attack, this news was to be expected, but it does not make it any less painful. Also when reflecting on the beginnings of the Znak Publishing House. Therefore, I dedicate these fragmentary notes to the memory of Jerzy and the memory of other friends, most of whom have already left this world, without whom Znak Publishing House simply would not exist. Because all of them, gathered around “Tygodnik Powszechny”, dreamed for years about expanding and consolidating the activities of “Tygodnik” and the monthly “Znak” through books that would have fundamentally the same goal as both our publications. I tried to formulate it in the 1984 Catalog, published for the 25th anniversary of the Publishing House: “…deepening religious life, participation in the life of the Church, the knowledge and culture of Polish Catholics, and the ethical and historical consciousness of our entire society, in the spirit of Papini’s wise saying that he who is blind to the past, runs blindly into the future. We tried to accompany our own society […]. We believed and still believe that in joys one should guard against triumphalism, and in sorrows – against despair. It is hard for us to say how much inspiration and encouragement we owe to our ever-growing number of readers, friends, and collaborators, sometimes professing a different worldview but wholeheartedly appreciating similar values and goals of aspirations.”
In fact, we launched the Publishing House, to be honest, without a penny, thanks to a loan and donations generously given to us by nearly 900 readers who read about our intentions in “Tygodnik”. I return here again to the circle of closest friends, without whom – as I said – Znak Publishing House would not exist. They continuously served with their extensive culture, reading in several languages, sometimes vast libraries, and excellent discernment of values. For over thirty years, while managing the Publishing House, I could always trust their initiatives, their literary and moral opinions, their prudence. I will list only in alphabetical order the names of those with whom I initially had the most frequent contacts as a publisher: Fr. Andrzej Bardecki, Antoni Gołubiew, Maria z Morstinów Górska, Hanna Malewska, Zofia Starowieyska-Morstinowa, Mieczysław Pszon, Jerzy Turowicz, Stefan Wilkanowicz.
I can already see how many people I am wronging by not mentioning them on this list – but I am not writing a monograph after all. So I will mention only three more people, rather from the executive rather than legislative branch, whose merits for Znak Publishing House are simply immeasurable: Krystyna Chmielecka, the publishing secretary, whose tact, calmness, modesty, knowledge, and diligence proved invaluable. Zygmunt Pawlus, the technical editor, a partisan, dynamic, resourceful, always brimming with optimism and humor. With these two, who eventually formed a marital bond, we worked together and amicably for 30 years, probably without a single discord! I realize that by defining their function in two words, I am committing a glaring anachronism. Because Krysia was simultaneously my deputy, an editor or editress, proofreader, led and typed extensive correspondence on the typewriter, and so on, and Zygmunt was also a canvasser and paper calculator, our multifunctional ambassador in printing houses and truly a man for all seasons. A little shorter worked with us, as the head of the Publishing House’s administration and its commercial branch, an experienced pre-war bookseller, Mr. Antoni Ochęduszko, who under the guise of a businessman hid a heart sensitive to human miseries and troubles.
On the other hand, the state institutions showed an impressive insensitivity, even to the simple dictates of common sense, as if they were developed only to hinder all initiatives and development. Occasionally, especially at lower levels, there were clerks and clerks with whom one could come to human terms. There must have been some decision-makers sitting higher who evidently recognized that it was not entirely necessary to turn off this safety valve, which, thanks to our publications and the Publishing House, allowed a stream of fresh air to reach the weary Polish lungs. Of course, this was only possible thanks to the power of the Church, which did not expire even when it was most heavily oppressed.
The first two books that brought us the means to publish subsequent books were – in 1959 – “Droga krzyżowa” by Primate Stefan Wyszyński, 50 thousand copies, and “Listy do przyjaciela” by Antoni Gołubiew (reflections on the Lord’s Prayer), 20 thousand. In the same year, we also managed to publish “Opowiadania i podróże” by Stefan Kisielewski, 10 thousand. The following year, eight titles were published, whose character clearly announced the line of the Publishing House: essays by Gołubiew and Thomas Merton (we had no foreign currency, but copyright for foreign language books was usually given to us as a gift, or almost, because for the then Polish zlotys), a selection from among four hundred works submitted to one of the so-called Spodek contests (by Marek Skwarnicki) entitled “Moi rodzice” (with an afterword by Józefa Hennelowa) – by the way, Mrs. Zatorska from the Publishing Department could not later regret that she “accidentally” approved this book in the publishing plan (because where were the parents with Marxist-Leninist convictions?), Stanisław Stomma’s “Myśli o polityce i kulturze”, Stefan Swieżawski’s “Rozum i tajemnica”, Jerzy Zawieyski’s “Kartki z dziennika”, a novel by Evelyn Waugh about St. Helena, and a Prayer Book.
In 1961, we published ten books, and for the next twenty years, we could not overcome the authorities’ resistance to increasing the number of titles. Something stirred only at the beginning of the eighties, that is, after the first pilgrimage of John Paul II to Poland (June 1979); after the Nobel Prize for Miłosz (October 1980): the authorities then agreed to the official publication of a selection of his poems – and in an expedited manner – contradicting the long periods when the only response to our efforts and persuasions was: “that you always have to ally with the enemies of the People’s Republic of Poland”; finally, after the wave of strikes in 1980, as a result of which a significant Commission for Censorship was established within the Committee for the Agreement of Creative and Scientific Associations. Suffice it to say that for the year 1981, 13 positions were approved in our publishing plan, and in the next three years, terrible for Poland and the “Znak” and “Tygodnik” environment, 16, 22, and 34 titles were approved in succession without any logic!
But also during this period, censorship and the whole style of “socialist planned economy” were slowly coming apart at the seams. The absurdity of this planning was that it was supposed to be an instrument of total control over everything, and life does not like that: too much is unhealthy. In the columns that had to be filled out when submitting a request to the Publishing Department of the Ministry of Culture in many copies for plan approval and paper allocation (the Ministry forwarded our documents to both the Office for Religious Affairs and probably the Ministry of Security, probably also to some economic instances, certainly to party instances and God knows where else), such headings appeared: author, original language, catalog price, edition (which in order?), format in millimeters, print run, volume (in publishing sheets and printing sheets) – the print run and volume had to be prophetically determined a year before printing and sometimes before the book was finished, paper and cardboard (type, class, weight, quantity in kg), justification of the position. Exemplum: for the plan for 1977, we inserted sixteen positions in the autumn of 1976, in mid-March we received approval for six positions, in mid-August for two additional positions, with the obligation to print them by the end of 1977, which was completely unrealistic because censorship held books indefinitely, and the printing houses (state-owned, of course: we got our own machines, mainly thanks to Nawojka Cieślińska’s efforts in Germany, much later, already in different times) were notoriously overloaded and terribly delayed with composition, with three proofs, with printing, similarly bookbinders with binding…
Therefore, we often had to exchange one or another title for something easier, e.g., for a reprint or a book deleted by the Ministry in one of the previous plans. But with such an exchange, it was necessary to present the matter again in writing to the Ministry of Culture, ensuring that everything fit within the already approved limits of paper, print run, volume, etc., which was somewhat facilitated by the fact that we entered the data roughly, as the authors were also not eager to finalize their texts, not knowing whether they would be approved by the Ministry and what gaps censorship would make in them: if too large and nothing could be reclaimed, we had to withdraw the book and start the whole “planned” merry-go-round anew. All changes to the originally projected print runs and volumes also had to be detailed and justified. An avalanche of unnecessary paperwork and redundant ministerial clerks, a terrible waste of time! One thing did not change: the print runs of serious books, averaging ten thousand, usually disappeared entirely, and it was difficult to guess how much more could be printed because the rigidly predetermined number of copies, regardless of any demand surveys, was – like everything else – strictly limited (perhaps except for those copies that the printing house sometimes managed to print on the side and sell on the side as its own benefit). When I now read those justifications from the last column of the publishing plan, I am pleasantly struck by how little bureaucratic jargon there is, how much disarming naivety. Maybe it wasn’t the most effective, but we preferred not to be cunning. I look at our 1976 plan: for the second time, we include “Meditations” by Fr. Pietraszko… for the fourth time, Miłosz’s poems, explaining that he is a great poet… for the fourth time also a book about Fr. Korniłowicz… For the fifth time, a story about Fr. Ali Fedorowicz, I quote the justification: “mainly woven around the accounts of people who came into contact with him. The figure of a priest who would like to be, above all and simply, a normal priest, a good pastor. The value and relevance of such an attitude are beyond doubt.” A touching sentence! For the sixth time, Stefan Kisielewski’s reflections on literature appear in the plan. Year 1978: among others, Essays by Stanisław Vincenz. Justification: “For the third time, we include in the plan a book by an outstanding writer […] recalling in Poland a thinker who always wrote with such love about Polish culture and widely familiarized foreigners with it would be a beautiful, though only posthumous, act of justice, and the sketches on Hasidic culture are one of the main arguments we can put forward against the constant attacks on ‘Polish anti-Semitism’. If we are to build bridges between the country and emigration, publishing Vincenz will certainly be one of them.”
A drop hollows out the stone… Meditations by Fr. Pietraszko appeared in 1977 and again in 1983, Miłosz – well-known, the book about Fr. Korniłowicz was published by the friendly “Więź” in 1978, about Fr. Ali was written by Barbara Krzysztoń, her text was published by the Theological Institute of the Missionaries in 1988: I don’t know if it has anything to do with the position we included five times in the plan. Kisiel’s essays on literature were printed in 1979, Vincenz in 1980. We adopted the principle: there is no point in dodging, we have our worldview oddities, even linguistic ones, which we insist on in the eyes of the authorities. And let’s try to treat these official evaluators of our texts as normal people who in the end may be able to understand something. Many laughed at such methodology (on both sides of the barricade), I even remember a certain department director who, after one of my tirades on Polish culture, leaned his thick elbows on the desk, looked at me with disbelief, and exclaimed: “sir, you don’t know what country you live in?” However, sometimes a drop hollowed out the stone, because the stone was aging and crumbling.
My funniest memory (because there was something funny about it, though rarely) is associated with Józef Czapski’s book, “Patrząc” (submitted for composition on April 30, 1982. Signed for printing on December 23, 1982. Printing completed in February 1983. Ten thousand copies). I returned from a series of lectures from France and found that although the possibility of publishing emigrants had finally been established, my colleagues, desperate by the senselessness of haggling with censorship, decided to melt down Czapski’s lead columns and gave up printing the book. I flew into a rage, somehow got through to the chief censor in Warsaw and, slowly cooling down during the conversation, realized that he only cared about the book resembling Czapski’s “Eye”, published by the Parisian “Kultura”, as little as possible. I immediately proposed a different title, a different order of individual essays, and unfortunately the removal of a few texts that had no chance of being printed at the time (they concerned the Soviet Union). But the rest was so valuable that in my opinion it was worth it a hundred times over. Here, however, the last obstacle appeared: the copyright belonged to the Literary Institute (that is, to the “Kultura” publishing house). I said that I must note this in the colophon, otherwise our book would be plain theft. Word by word, the censor finally asked if instead of “Literary Institute” we could write, as was often the case in “Kultura” colophons, “Institut Littéraire”. I said I saw no obstacles. To which he, very pleased, literally announced: “You know, for camouflage.” I thought I would burst out laughing – the censor asked what amused me so much – I’m not sure if I clearly explained to him that I didn’t know who was supposed to camouflage themselves from whom and why? Maybe he was a joker more witty and ironic than I thought over the phone? Either way, I’m glad my successors no longer have to conduct such conversations. And although they have other troubles, I trust that they fully appreciate the absence of such a particularly ugly problem. Jacek Woźniakowski
January 1999 The text is available on the website http://www.znak.com.pl/jwoz.php