Researching the contemporary legacies of Polish underground printing

I left Warsaw, and a quick train-ride later arrived in Lodz, home of the Tryzno’s and their Book arts museum which they have been running since the 1980’s.

They are preparing to celebrate its birthday this October, which I hope to come back to attend. I spent the first week in an Airbnb nearby, as they had said that there wasn’t accommodation in the email. However, they did offer me to sleep on the sofa thing in one of the rooms. I felt like I had to live the true experience of the museums and so I chose not to continue the rental past the week.

The first week was mostly spent getting my footing, talking to the Tryznos, finding small ways to test out their equipment. I met several people coming in and out of the building, various film students, Master Bookbinders – hitting the vodka at 2 pm, yet working through the night. It was not the dusty basement operation I had expected. Well, it was, but it was so much more. I began working on a book I had wanted to make for a long time. The museum is currently undergoing renovations, so I tried to help/ keep out of the way. Kryzstof is the technical wizard technician. Last year they developed a way for a Monotype caster to run off a Raspberry Pi, which was pretty impressive. They were fixing some old Soviet radios when I was there, and I would wander in and ask their advice often throughout the project. They also had a thing for death metal which was amusing.

On the second week, I bit the bullet and moved into the Museum. I say bit the bullet because I am a chicken and I was sure that the place must be haunted. Luckily I had a dog friend with me. He was pretty old. One night I was working late and alone in the basement, and I kept hearing a repeating thud. It took me a while to realise it was the dog scratching himself and not the knocking of a spirit from times past. The house was owned by Henryk Grohman, who was a large cotton factory owner. Lodz was built on textiles, and the place is so reminiscent of Manchester it was incredible.  So, the building in itself is a monument to this time, this industry. The upstairs holds one of the largest collections of Polish book arts and in the basement is the workshop.

During this time, I got to explore not only this incredible building but their collections of type.

This is where they store their Matrices. Which they acquired from the Warsaw Type Foundry. Like many Letterpress museums, the equipment has been pieced together and the many collective histories unknown. They worked previously to digitise the Brygada font. I used the experience to make a small book, it was inspired by the building and the industrial patterns. I integrated papers speakers and magnets and built an amplifier into the book. This was used to play sounds collected around the building. During my time I was able to ask Jadwiga Tryzno a few questions about how the museum began, how the publishing group ‘ Correspondence des Artistes’ ran, especially during censorship. She emailed me some further answers in Polish, which I will be translating and writing up for the final blog…

I arrived in Warsaw, coming directly from Kielce. There, I was to be host by Gwido Zlatkes, a poet, librarian and Polish-English translator, Gwido was active, writing during the times of censorship. He is auther of Duplicator Underground, – an extremely useful book on the Underground Print Movement. He was part of the Freedom and Peace movement, worked in Poland’s experimental theatre. He was a journalist for the Solidarity movement; later he briefly worked as a foreign desk editor for the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. In the 90s he moved to America working in UC Riverside as a librarian. He is currently a collector of rare artist books when we met last year; he was running the Gallery of Beautiful Books, in the very heart of Warsaw. However, he was in the process of moving, due to the recurring story amongst artists of the rent being put up. He kindly hosted me, and I was hoping that during this time I would assist with the manual work of setting up the new studio, but the floor had not been put in (oh drat). He did show me around his intriguing new site. It is in the basement on a typical Soviet estate, below A Georgian Orthodox Church- something which I had never been inside before and was painted with brilliant blues and reds. Then we headed underground into the basement of the building. It was a number of hidden artists’ studios, buried in brick tunnels. Long and dimly lit, the kind where you flick a switch, and it takes a few momentary hums before the ballast kicks the fluorescent tube into action. That musty smell which infiltrates and lingers. It invoked the underground movement. There was even a hidden room, through a wardrobe with a mimeograph – one of the most powerful tools of the underground movement. The mimeograph was obsolete and unused in many other countries since the fifties, but during censorship, the poles embraced it to create their own publications; telling their own stories.

That evening we got into conversation about Alexander Wat; Gwido is currently producing a compendium of his work and life. I asked him how his interest began. He talked about his first encounter at a flea market, where he found the book ‘In the 1980s everyone collected books, books aligned you with being part of the intelligentsia, books showed you were outside of the state.’ He had originally intended to purchase a different rare book, but the stall owner had insisted that he buy two books – as it was the end of the day and to make up for his time. ‘It was a funny time; the state was producing books in their thousands. These were not just propaganda, but other books, books on social sciences, inoffensive books. Books were everywhere, and books were nowhere. I remember people queuing for Lord of the Rings…’ So, he picked up the first book he found and within the first few pages of Wat’s poetry, he found something which profoundly resonated with him.

It sounds like a scary time for publishers, you were able to produce work, but it had to be state approved. If you wanted to produce independently, as Radosław Nowakowski had told me, it had to be done in a run of under one hundred copies. ‘Anything to do with Polish history was banned’ – the Russians had played a huge part in the extermination of many Polish officers during the first part of the second world war, as well as putting many of the Polish intelligentsia and landowners into Siberian work-camps. So of course, it was crucial for the state to keep this out of mainstream media. I wondered whether there could be parallels drawn with the current actions of the Polish government, who have not only banned all acknowledgement of any Polish involvement with the Holocaust but are currently rewriting history with themselves in the spotlight. Not to mention that the media law that took effect in January, this empowered the treasury minister – not an independent body – to appoint the managers of Poland’s public television and radio broadcasters. By April, over 140 public media employees had resigned or been fired. The difference is, currently we are still able to have these conversations without the fear of being overheard.

After a few days, it was with a heavy heart that I left Warsaw.