Wiedza Powszechna (literally "Common Knowledge") is a publishing house in Poland.[1]
It originated in 1946 in Post World War II Poland as a subdivision of the Czytelnik publishing house, initiated by Stanisław Tazbir.[2]
In 1952, with the major rearrangement of the state, which officially became the Polish People's Republic, the government created a separate State Publishing House known as the Wiedza Powszechna, whose full name was Państwowe Wydawnictwo: Wiedza Powszechna (English, "State Publishing House of Common Knowledge") or the Wiedza Powszechna: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Popularno-Naukowe (English, "State-Owned Popular Science Publishing House"). It became a major publisher specializing in dictionaries (vocabularies, encyclopedic dictionaries, etc., language textbooks, phrase books, etc., both for Polish and foreign languages, as well as popular science books in various areas.[2][3]
In 2007 it was privatized into a sp. z o.o. (Polish equivalent of limited liability company,[2] which went bankrupt in 2011 [4]
In 2012 it was reestablished in Warsaw[5] as Wydawnictwo Wiedza Powszechna (Wiedza Powszechna Publishing House), specializing in foreign language dictionaries and textbooks.[2][6]