Polish research on publishing in Poland between 1945 and 2015: Themes, legacy and implications for further research

Abstract

The history of publishing in Poland encompasses many issues associated with the emergence and dissemination of printed books. Of fundamental significance to the study of these issues are the records of the publishing output: while we have nearly complete, though still underexamined, records of this output for the period from the 15th to the 18th century, documented in bibliographies and catalogues, the situation is worse when it comes to the 19th and 20th centuries, until the outbreak of the Second World War. In this respect, what we need is not only a continuation, but a radical intensification of bibliographic work. This concerns works published in the Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Greek scripts, as well as musical notation. Polish book scholars have devoted a lot of attention to the beginnings of printing in Poland. The historiography concerning various typographic workshops located in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is rich; however, it still requires further extensive studies. Scholars have also been interested in phenomena influ- encing the content structure of printed publications, such as publishing privileges (in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), censorship and restrictions imposed by the partitioning powers and later by Poland’s communist authorities, as a result of which Polish publications had to be printed abroad and an independent publishing movement emerged. The scholars’ research interests have also focused on books as products of printers and publishers and on the publication of written works. Scholars have examined both the various components of the book (title page, printer’s signet, stemmata, etc.) and its editorial composition as a whole. Their undoubted achievements in the studies of the history of publishing in Poland are significant, yet in many areas they need to be continued and expanded (one important task is the edition of sources for the study of the history of Polish publishing) and to investigate the phenomena that stem from developmental tendencies in modern book studies.