Wat Aleksnader- Unemployed Lucifer[cover design and illustrations by Jan Lebenstein].

Warsaw-Krakow 2009/ Foundation of Literary Notebooks, Austeria Publishing House/14.5x22.5cm/s.206/ color illustrations outside the text/ hardcover, cardboard/ very good condition, minor rubbing on edges

Cover design and illustrations by Jan Lebenstein

Elegant edition

On April 28, 1954, Aleksander Wat comes across, probably in one of Warsaw's antique shops, a piece of Unemployed Lucifer from 1927. The poet buys the lost book, [...] makes many interesting corrections, which will be used in the post-war edition, depleted by two stories challenged by the censors. In 1963, Jan Lebenstein read Unemployed Lucifer and fell into raptures. A tangible testimony to this admiration is the fact that he illustrated the individual stories, and he covered the book with a massive binding in luciferian black and red. [He probably gave a piece of the "devil's book" he had enriched with his own pieces as a Christmas gift to the poet. Today, both pieces appear in one edition in phototype likeness. To the text of the pre-war edition, which is more complete, and additionally enriched with Wat's manuscript corrections and his dedications, to his wife and to Lebenstein, Jan Lebenstein's illustrations were added from a unique piece of the post-war edition. The result was a new whole containing the uncensored text of the book with the author's corrections and the illustrations adhering to this text like a glove. Two in one.

From the afterword by Jan Zielinski, History of a certain amalgamation