The book is a memoir of our Editor-in-Chief and it presents the inside stories of many important literary and artistic events he participated in and organized within the last 25 years. Jerzy Illg really shows that publishing can be the most fascinating job in the world. Jerzy’s sense of humour and unconventional approach to his work allowed him to publish some really great names but also to stage cabarets, make films as well as to invent unusual promotional events and … non-existent books.

The most important aspect this book are Jerzy’s friendships with writers and thus we get some excellent and anecdotal portraits of such great writers as Czeslaw Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Ryszard Kapuściński, Seamus Heaney or Josif Brodsky. Always carefully hidden from journalists their meetings, conversations, travels, long nights full of whisky and poetry are described in writing for the first time.

The book includes also: hereto unpublished limericks and collages by Wisława Szymborska, occasional poetry by Czesław Miłosz, Leszek Kolakowski, Seamus Heaney, Josif Brodsky and Derek Walcott; photos by Annie Leibovitz, Ryszard Kapusciński, Joanna Helander, drawings by Józef Czapski, Allen Ginsberg, Sławomir Mrożek and Andrzej Dudziński, as well as epitaphs, paeans, satirical verse and traditional Irish songs.

Jerzy Illg was born in 1950 in Poznań (like many other good and hardworking people). He is a publisher, literary critic and a literary adventurer. Since 1992 he has been the Editor-in-Chief of Znak Publishers. He took part in the first Polish hippie rallies in 1968 which prevented him from making several mistakes later on in his life. During the martial law in Poland he was fired from the Uniwersytet Śląski and this became a real smile of fortune as it directed his steps towards the publishing world. Three times a participant of the Nobel Prize celebrations, he quickly realized that fame and fortune was not for him. Friendship is what he values most.