16
PARTISAN REVIEW
machines. Later, silkscreens were used and finally small offset presses were
smuggled across the border. Or the texts were printed "on the sly"-in a
state print shop, either during or after work hours.
The market for independent publishers grew at an amazing rate. From
September 1976 to August 1980, thirty-five presses put out around five
hundred books and pamphlets and around two hundred journals. From
August 1980 to December 1981, from the strikes in the Gdansk shipyards
and the rise of Solidarity to the imposition of martial law, about two hun–
dred presses and publishing si tes produced over twenty-five hundred
bound copies and thirty-two hundred ti tles of journals and bulletins.
The imposition of martial law did not stop the raging river of words
nor the democratic aspirations of Polish society. This was a blow to the
underground current of independent presses; in the parliamentary session
of March 22, 1983, the Minister of Internal Affairs noted that, during the
eleven months of martial law, the securi ty forces had confiscated 1,310
presses. Despite the major losses in equipment and internment of those
linked to independent presses, publishing efforts went even more deeply
underground and became even more impressive (for example, the popular
Tygodnik Mazowsze
had reached a circulation of fifty thousand copies).
Between 1982 and 1985 alone, there were 834 publishers and printers.
Mter the imposition of martial law, about five thousand books and
pamphlets were published and close to fourteen hundred journals, a record
in countries under Communist rule. In addition, countless copies of
poems and songs, wall calendars and posters, and underground postal ser–
vices (special issue stamps, date-stamps, and postcards) were produced in
prisons and internment camps. Given the dimensions of this phenomenon,
the regime could not have won its war against the people. We were deal–
ing with a real "paper revolution," which transformed the totalitarian
system into a normal democratic state without bloodshed. At this point,
the emigre, clandestine, and official
Ii
teratures again became one.
Milosz's books were the ones most frequently published in the under–
ground, and his poems were copied onto cassette tapes. As Miroslaw Adam
Supruniuk states, the independent presses had "by the end of 1981 published
everything that Milosz had written after the war (with the exception of
The
Issa Tillley,
which appeared officially)." During the Solidarity period every
independent publisher tried to publish Milosz's poems, especially after he
received the Nobel Prize. Some of the titles appeared many times over in
various presses. Most printings of
The Captive Mind,
for example, were
"wild" editions-unmarked with a press label and most likely printed for
profit and sold at high prices. A complete description of this phenomenon
is still impossible, even though a few of the larger libraries-the National
Library and the Jagiellonian-are collecting underground publications. The
