Letter OPEN to MKiDN

Shame, Madam Minister!

Shame, Mr. Rypson.!

You have been given into your care a place you did not create.
You did not build it over more than thirty years. You did not fight for every złoty, every machine, every matrix and every additional year of survival. You received a ready-made heritage, earned by the private effort of people who for decades did everything to keep this place alive.
And today you want to decide that you know better what this museum should be.

30 years of struggle

The Book Art Museum functioned for more than thirty years as a private institution that repeatedly had to fight for its very existence.
The museum contains an installation that is a kind of chronicle of that struggle. Year after year. Documents after documents. Repeated orders to vacate the building. Repeated problems.
The Tryznos persisted.
Without large state funds, they kept it going. They renovated. They repaired. They rescued. They organized. They acquired machines and collections. They built a community.
Please come and see the cellars of Grohman's Villa.
Please see the roof.
Please look at the building and ask yourself what it would look like today if no one had been saving it all these years.
That is why calling this museum “a political decision by Gliński aimed at Zdanowska” or reducing its entire history to similarly political stories is more than a misunderstanding.
It is mockery of the people who rescued this place for decades.
It is mockery of the history of this museum.
And it is a disgrace for an institution that, instead of protecting cultural heritage, tries to explain its history away with short-term politics.
This museum existed long before Minister Gliński.
It existed before the current leadership of the Ministry of Culture.
It did not come into being because of a political decision.
It came into being through people’s work.
And it survived thanks to people.

Why did the state intervene at all!

Please recall why the contract with the foundation was signed.
Not because someone decided to give someone a political gift!!!
The situation was dramatic.
Once again it was necessary to fight for this place’s survival. Information about the museum’s condition spread across Poland and the world. People wrote, appealed, helped.
Because people who visited this place fell in love with it.
And apparently that is impossible to understand if you look only at spreadsheets, organizational charts and lines of subordination.
The Book Art Museum was never a warehouse of exhibits.
People did not come here to look at motionless machines standing behind glass.
They came to see the machines working, to take part in typesetting and bookbinding workshops and many others.
To touch the history of the art of the book.
To talk to people who know how to run devices that remember a completely different technological era.
It was a living museum.
And that is precisely why people remember it.

The world noticed it before the Polish State.!

In 2015 the Book Art Museum was honored with an award from the American Printing History Association in New York.
It was one of the few European institutions recognized in this way.
The world could see the value of this place.
Why does its own state have such a problem with it?

140 thousand reasons!

In the collections connected with the museum there are about 140,000 matrices for casting type.
OSTATNI ZACHOWANY NA ŚWIECIE ZBIOR MATRYC Z POLSKIMI LITERAMI

Please pause for a moment and consider what that actually means.
This is not a collection of old objects.
This is the material record of a technology developed over hundreds of years.
From Gutenberg through successive generations of printers, type founders, typographers and type designers until the moment when this technology was replaced by new methods of composition and printing.
Then the digital age arrived.
This branch of technology ended.
And its material testimony remained here.
It was from these collections that the forgotten Brygada was unearthed, later recreated as Brygada 1918. - available for free on Google Fonts. - the typeface used in this letter
And that is the best proof of the difference between storing heritage and protecting it.
You can lock a matrix in a display case and write the date next to it.
Or you can, thanks to it, bring a fragment of Polish culture back to life.
The Tryznos chose the latter.

A museum is not display cases!

And that is why the idea of turning a living museum into yet another unit showing books and machines behind glass is a misunderstanding of the essence of this place.
And most sadly, an absolute lack of imagination on your part!
It was not the building that was its greatest value.
Not the machines themselves.
Not the books themselves.
Not the matrices themselves.
The greatest value was the combination of these things with the knowledge of the people who knew how to use them.
A printing press standing for five years in storage is a piece of iron.
The same press, started up by a person who knows how to work on it, becomes a living history of technology.
Is it really so hard to see the difference?

Three years of hibernation!

For three years, instead of carrying out the renovation, you have maintained the museum in a state of permanent suspension.
The main seat, Grohman's Villa, remains closed by order of the District Building Inspector.
We could not carry out normal activities.
We could not invite people into the place that contains the heart of the museum.
We could not use its greatest asset, the combination of place, machines, collections and people.
And at the same time the renovation did not start.
This is exactly the hibernation of an institution.
We are paying for a museum that is not allowed to operate normally.
We are paying for a building whose condition does not improve during that time.
We are paying for successive years of waiting.
And time works against a monument.

Another lost year!

We are now in the eighth month of the year in which the conservator of monuments ordered the renovation of the building.
And already today it is hard to imagine how the whole process could be properly carried out in the remaining months.
You must prepare and announce proceedings even for something as simple as a roof repair.
You must select a contractor.
You must bring documentation to a state that allows obtaining the required approvals.
And the documentation that some apparently consider complete contains errors and shortcomings that need to be corrected.
What remains is a no-tender procedure, and that, combined with the quality of Polish construction firms, will be your worst nightmare, Madam.

Another year has been wasted.
Madam Minister, for another year public money is being spent not on saving the museum but on its hibernation.
In that time the condition of the building deteriorates.
Its elements decay.
Roof problems do not disappear because we put the documents off for another year.
In the garden historic trees are breaking because someone should also be taking care of them.
Each additional year of delay may mean a greater scope of work and greater costs.
If this is not mismanagement, then please tell us what we should call it.

Why close the museum for five years?

There is one more question we want an answer to.
Why should the renovation of Grohman's Villa mean the death of the museum’s activities for three, four or five years?
Why should the machines be sent to storage?
Why can’t temporary premises be found to which at least part of the workshop could be moved?
The machines could work.
People could come.
The museum could run workshops.
It could educate.
It could earn money.
It could exist.
And after the renovation is completed it could return to Grohman's Villa as a living institution, not an organization that after several years would have to be rebuilt from scratch.
Because you can renovate a building in a few years.
But in a few years you can also irretrievably destroy a community.

One day

The annual budget of this museum must be compared to the scale of other state expenditures.
Amounts that in large public institutions can disappear in a very short time here can mean a year of operation.
So answer yourself a simple question.
What will have greater value in fifty years?
A few hours or one day of television programming?
Will preserved machines, matrices, books, knowledge and people representing several hundred years of the history of Polish printing be more valuable?
We will watch your hands.
We will check all available information concerning purchases made over the last year and a half.
We will ask about every złoty spent on things that could have waited while the roof could not wait, the monument could not wait and the museum could not wait.
We will ask about priorities.
We will check publicly available contracts.
Cost estimates.
Invoices to which we have the right of access.
Every beam.
Every nail.
Every złoty of public money spent on renovation.
Not because we want to stop the renovation.
On the contrary.
We have been waiting for it for years.
We will watch your hands because this monument is too valuable to allow one more złoty and one more year to be wasted after years of delay.

Shame even before Grohman

There is someone in this story before whom you should be simply ashamed: Henryk Grohman.
A man who, although he himself was not Polish, supported Polish culture and Polish artists, and whose house ultimately became a place serving culture.
I want to believe that over all those years he would have looked with pride at what Janusz Paweł Tryzno created in his house.
At working machines.
At printed books.
At artists.
At students.
At pupils.
At friends.
At people sitting in the kitchen and talking for hours about art.
Because that is precisely what this museum was.
A home.
A workshop.
A school.
A museum.
And a community at the same time.

You can’t buy this

We did not need millions spent on creating the illusion of security to know that this place must be watched over.
Each of us felt responsible for the building and for what is in it.
Janusz Paweł Tryzno had for free something that cannot be bought in any ministerial tender.
He had people who cared.
He had their trust.
He had friends.
He had students.
He had staff.
He had people ready to come, help, repair, move, print, guide a guest or simply keep watch over the place.
You can spend millions on cameras, alarm systems, procedures, security and administration.
But for no money will you buy the sense of responsibility for a place that was created among people over thirty years.
And here we come to something you have apparently forgotten.

Janusz Paweł Tryzno is dead.
But we are alive.
His friends are alive.
His students are alive.
His collaborators are alive.
People he made fall in love with this museum are alive.
People he taught to print, create and think about the book differently are alive.
We feel like heirs to the idea of this museum.
And we will fight for it further.
Only today the situation is completely different.
You are not fighting a private foundation that could be presented as an entity caring for a monument.
Today you are fighting your own institution.
A museum you were supposed to save.
People who want it to continue to live.
Perhaps someone thought it would be enough to wait.
That people would get tired.
That they would go away.
That they would forget.
We will not forget.

I voted for you

And finally something particularly sad for me personally.
I voted for your coalition.
And probably I would still be ready to vote for it…
So please do not try to explain this letter as a political attack on the current government.
That would be too simple. This is not a letter from a political opponent.

If Madam Minister intends to uphold the decision leading to the merger of the Book Art Museum with Muzeum Sztuki and the fundamental change of the character of BAM, please let the responsibility for this decision also be taken by someone who understands its political, social and historical consequences.
Let someone publicly say:
"Yes. I know what the Book Art Museum was. I know how it functioned for more than thirty years. I know what is in its collections. I know how many people are associated with it. I know the difference between a working machine and a machine standing in storage. And I consciously take responsibility for a decision that may end the museum’s previous form of activity."
Let someone sign that statement with their own name.

A shame for the whole ministry and, consequently, the government !!

You can close the building.
You can remove the machines.
You can hide them in warehouses.
You can change the organizational structure.
You can merge institutions.
You can create new regulations, positions and organizational charts.
But there is one thing you cannot do.
You cannot, by administrative decision, eliminate the people who over thirty years grew up around this place.
You cannot eliminate memory.
You cannot annul an idea by decree.
Janusz Paweł Tryzno is dead.
But we are alive.
And we will defend this museum.
With documents.
With facts.
With control of expenditures.
With public information.
With the voice of people of culture.
With the voice of all those who know what the Book Art Museum really was and what it can still be.
History will remember those who for decades created this place.
But it will also remember those who were given it into their care.
And it will judge what they did with it.
Shame, Madam Minister.
Shame, Mr. Rypson.
And you, Mr. Rypson, as a man who himself worked with the art of the book and wrote about it, should understand the value of this place better than most people.
And that is precisely why in your case this shame is particularly....

Po ponad trzydziestu latach walki o przetrwanie tego miejsca nie pozwolimy, żeby jego historia zakończyła się w ciszy !!

Piotr Wilkocki - an ordinary, grey, simple museum worker. Friend of BAM since 2002.