The story the author recounts was just an episode in both the artistic career of Roman Cieslewicz, and in the history of the Polish illustrated press and popular culture. Symptomatically enough, the first art director of the Ty i Ja monthly was one of Poland’s most prominent artists, a star of the Polish poster school. He was a member of the editorial board for three years only, from May 1960 until June 1963, but his graphic vision shaped the character and style of the magazine right up to its very last issues. After leaving for France, Cieslewicz collaborated with the monthly for an entire decade, until its suppression in 1973. This past spring, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death, the National Museum in Poznań organised a large retrospective exhibition and catalogue of Cieslewicz’s works. Only a few pages of the catalogue were, however, devoted to the Ty i Ja magazine. Active as an artist for nearly half a century, Cieslewicz is presently primarily associated with film, exhibition and theatre posters, and experimental engravings and photos. All the same, the old issues of the magazine clearly indicate that something important was happening at the time. Above all else, Cieslewicz had a sense of humour and a sense of form. His task (according to a description by Zbigniew Florczak in Ty i Ja) consisted of “unflagging efforts to renew the sign and the picture”. At the same time, he performed yet another transgression: he introduced art onto the cover of an illustrated magazine. This ironic gesture, somewhere in the middle between high and popular culture, was the gesture of a professional and a visionary who was trying to transform a socialist imagination. Unfortunately, Ty i Ja was suppressed in December 1973 – as a result of the increasing interventions of censorship.