A Guide to the Stamp Album by Tomasz Lec

Abstract

The artist Tomasz Lec has done one of the most original graphic designs referring to Bruno Schulz. It is a cover of The Regions of Great Heresy and Environs by Jerzy Ficowski, the founding father of Schulz studies. The black cover shows a page from a stamp album with nineteenth- and twentieth-century stamps. This idea is a direct reference to Rudolf ’s stamp album from the short story “Spring” which includes the motif of the Book, fundamental for Schulz’s fiction. All the stamps have been supplemented by Lec with a graphic motif connected with Schulz (e.g., a panorama of Drogobych, the writer’s self-portrait or an illustration from The Book of Idolatry). According to Lec, each of the fourteen stamps is supposed to be an allusion to a specific chapter of The Regions of Great Heresy. At the end of the essay there is an short guide to his stamp album by Tomasz Lec. The artist has identified in it both the stamps that he used and the Schulzian graphic motifs he added in his both symbolic and humorous collage.