#vokno

"..the East European participation had no precedent except for the representatives of exile-publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, mostly Czechs, Slowaks, Croats, mostly of extremely conservative kind. In october 1981, shortly before Jaruzelski's putsch the official Frankfurt Book Fair housed the first tiny stand of Polish samizdat publishers hidden far away from the official Polish stand in the huge halls of the 'Messe'. The publications on show there, graphically powerfull in spite of the extremely simple means used, breathed a different atmosphere, evoked associations with the 'cultural underground' in Western Europe and North America in the sixties and seventies."