Foreign rights

PWN's contacts with foreign publishers, which became possible only after 1956, have borne fruit not only in the form of Polish editions of the world's scientific literature, but also of numerous foreign editions of books written by Polish scholars.

Until the 1990s joint editions by PWN and western publishers were very widespread. In total over 500 co-editions appeared, the result of PWN's cooperation with the following publishing houses: Academic Press, Elsevier, Horwood, INRA, Kluwer, Macmillan, Nijhoff, North Holland, Oxford University Press, Pergamon Press, Plenum, Reidel, Springer and VCH. Most frequent were publications by Polish authors from the fields of mathematical, natural and engineering sciences, while humanities were considerably less represented.

In the years 1958-2004 PWN signed over 600 contracts involving sale of copyrights to publishers from all over the world. Among the authors most frequently translated were: Andrzej Paczkowski, W�adys�aw Tatarkiewicz, Roman Ingarden, Witold Kula, Kazimierz Kuratowski and Hugo Steinhaus. Some of the works appeared in several foreign languages. W. Tatarkiewicz's A History of Six Ideas, for example, has so far been published in English, German, Chinese (in Taiwan), Hungarian, Italian (5 editions), Korean, Romanian, Russian, Spanish (9 editions) and Ukrainian. more »

The translation program whose aim is to provide assistance to foreign editions of Polish literature and humanities broadly understood, was created in connection with Poland's being honorary guest at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2000. So far over 200 books have received subsidies from the Fund, including several PWN titles.