Nieprofesjonalne edycje literatury popularnej z lat osiemdziesiątych - wstępne wyniki badań

Abstract

In the course of writing this article the author made use of the private collection of a friend as well as of available, though sparse and incomplete, bibliography. In the article he attempts to register, describe and analyse the unprofessional editions of popular literature available to the Polish reader between 1981 and 1990. According to the information provided by the editors in the studied works, some of the books appeared with the agreement of censorship; others came out thanks to the activities of the political underground. This information, however, may have been a pure camouflage used by the editors in order to hide their illegal publications. The books studied in this article can be divided into two groups. The first group includes translations of contemporary, particularly British, adventure novels (mainly the prose of Alistaire MacLean and Frederick Forsyth). They are usually available in the form of copied type scripts. The other one contains photocopies of Karl May’s novels published in Poland before the Second World War as well as the works of Adam Nasielski and Marek Romański - two Polish authors of detective prose during the interwar period. This article deals extensively with the registration and detailed description of the studied books, some of which came out in a remarkable book series. The main aim of the author is to register these works. They are bound to last only for a short time due to the low quality of materials used in the process of producing them. Therefore, the author points out there is a necessity to search for and describe further items of that kind.