Quality Problems with Book Production in Poland of the Nineteen-Fifties: Stalinist Diagnoses and Real Causes

Abstract

At the break of the nineteen-forties and the nineteen-fifties were characterised by low quality of production and graphic design. The communist authorities explained this state of affairs with faulty, obsolete planning methods of production and publishing. Actually, the main causes for the low quality of book production lay in technical problems with old and worn out machinery, inadequate supply of typeset matter, poor quality of materials (paper, ink, binding cardboard and cloth), and lack of qualifi ed personnel. Nevertheless, the communist authorities limited their activities aimed at changing this situation chiefl y to endless restructuring of the managing and planning institutions, and to issuing of new directives. Thus, problems with the quality of the graphical side of books and their physical state persisted until the change of the political and economic system in 1989.