Typescript in the age of “industrial culture”. On two versions of Black Paris by Jolanta Fuchsówna and Jan Brzękowski

Abstract

The article deals with a recently found typescripts of Black Paris by Jolanta Fuchsówna and Jan Brzękowski. It shows how the typewriter affected the dynamics of a collaborative creativity in the popular culture of Polish interwar modernism. A cooperation between a journalist working for the IKC press publishing company (Fuchsówna) and an avant-garde poet (Brzękowski) was established on the grounds of “the industrial culture” (Harro Segeberg), based on the non-literary forms of expression. A crime novel, meant to be published in a large-circulation journal, was being written simultaneously by the two authors. Reading the typescripts allows the reader to reconstruct the dynamics of the creation process, to understand how both writers negotiated and modified the pages of the typescript (including physical modifications) and to see how the invention of the typewriter influenced the creation process and some successive stages of the editorial process.