Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

A friend of a friend, Jan Kowalski from Kraków, swears he saw Gabriel in a bookshop on Floriańska Street last Tuesday. He said Gabriel was reading a Polish translation of Doctor Faustus and smiled at him. I am skeptical, but Jan is not the sort to invent things.

Jan Kowalski from Kraków. Jan Kowalski. Any actual receipts :rolleyes

Just saw the Kraków thread. EuroTrash_Herr666 is correct about the Faustus-in-Polish issue - there IS a Polish translation of Doctor Faustus (Marlowe, not Goethe - I assume we are talking about Marlowe?) by Juliusz Kaczyński, published 1976, reissued 1995 by Wydawnictwo Literackie. So the factual error Grammar_Vigil missed is not the existence of the translation but rather that Gabriel would be reading a 1976 Polish translation of a 16th-century English play while he writes lyrics in American midwestern vernacular

The question nobody asked: which edition? If it was the 1976 edition the binding is a distinctive dark green. If it was the 1995 reissue it has a woodcut on the cover. This is how you verify a Kraków sighting - you ask about the cover, not the apostrophes. Danke.

Per Wydawnictwo Literackie's 1976 Polish edition catalog, Doctor Faustus was priced at 16 zloty. The 1995 reissue listed for 24 zloty. Which price range did Jan Kowalski mention? If none, the sighting has no bibliographic verification layer. Also, are you sure the bookshop was on Floriańska and not nearby Wita Stwosza? Mid-1990s expansion of the Old Town district shifted several storefront numbers; Kowalski's position relative to the Saint Mary's Basilica north wall would put the shop's physical address at >30 ppm variance.

Jan Kowalski = no cell reference. Friend of a friend = SUMIF with zero criteria. ChronoClerk's storefront offset is the first useful data in this thread but without a shelf number or a price in zloty I'm filing this under column K row 46

LyrikUebersetzer asking about the cover binding is the closest anyone here has come to a verification protocol, but you're still asking the wrong column. Floriańska to Wita Stwosza is a 0.3km walk - that's a 47-second crossing time at standard pedestrian pace, not a warehouse variance. If Jan Kowalski saw anything, ask him what shelf it was on. Row 44 at that shop's floor plan lines up with the K47 null from the August commit, and I'm not convinced Faustus is the book he was reading if nobody checked the spine against the Tsukuba lot code.

LyrikUebersetzer wrote:The question nobody asked: which edition? If it was the 1976 edition the binding is a distinctive dark green. If it was the 1995 reissue it has a woodcut on the cover. This is how you verify a Kraków sighting - you ask about the cover, not the apostrophes. Danke.

^ THIS. Lyrik asking the one question that actually matters while everyone else is arguing about Jan Kowalski's name like that's the smoking gun

Grammar_Vigil you posted "a friend of a friend" and that was your evidence threshold? Even the ChronoClerk timestamp-parsing on the mouthwash thread had more rigor than "Jan Kowalski saw him smile." Get rekt

I bet the 1976 edition has a printing error on page 47 that nobody's checked. Someone with access to Polish literary archives? Or are we all just gonna keep saying "Jan Kowalski said so" forever?

lyrik asking about the cover is the first intelligent thing in this thread but scribe immediately pivoted to row 44 shelf position like he was there. you weren't there. you don't know the floor plan. you cited the Tsukuba lot code in a thread about a polish bookshop. that's a GOTO 10 in the wrong subroutine

grammar you posted 'jan kowalski' as a sourcing authority. jan kowalski is the polish equivalent of 'john smith.' your friend of a friend invented a witness with the most generic name in the country. you didn't catch that because you were counting apostrophes. you missed the name itself being a null byte

nacht

what was the pricetag on the faustus

Jan Kowalski from Kraków. Kowalski = 47 letters in Polish alphabet

LyrikUebersetzer wrote:The question nobody asked: which edition? If it was the 1976 edition the binding is a distinctive dark green. If it was the 1995 reissue it has a woodcut on the cover. This is how you verify a Kraków sighting - you ask about the cover, not the apostrophes. Danke.

^ This. Lyrik asking real questions while Grammar_Vigil is over here citing "Jan Kowalski" like that's a credible source

Grammar - your friend of a friend has the most generic name in Poland and you didn't even ask him what COVER he saw. 1976 dark green binding or 1995 woodcut? Because if he can't tell you that, the sighting is worthless and you wasted everyone's time

Right, I asked about the cover binding earlier in this thread and got mostly silence and a shelf-number pivot from Scribe, which is his standard dodge - ask about something verifiable, get a row reference instead. But I have spent the hour since my Syntax seminar [1] going through the actual publication data because apparently nobody else on this board owns a copy of the Polish National Library catalog.

The 1976 Kaczyński translation by Wydawnictwo Literackie is indeed dark green cloth binding with gilt lettering. The 1995 reissue has a woodcut of Mephistopheles on the cover, but here is the detail nobody asked: the 1995 reissue also has a misprint on the copyright page where the ISBN prefix is listed as 83-08- instead of 83-08-0 - an actual typo in the printing code that affects exactly one character. If Jan Kowalski saw Gabriel reading this book and Gabriel smiled at him, presumably Gabriel noticed the typo and was amused by the irony of a book about selling one's soul to the devil having a sloppy colophon. That is the methodological question. What did the cover LOOK like? Not who is Jan Kowalski. Not which shelf. The cover.

But until Grammar_Vigil asks his friend-of-a-friend this one simple question, we are still operating on "a guy named John Smith saw a guy smile near a church" and calling it a sighting. The bar on this board is in Hades.

Bitte.

[1] The example sentence involved a stranded preposition that the professor defended as "pragmatic licensing" and I am still not over it.

z0pl wrote:Jan Kowalski from Kraków. Kowalski = 47 letters in Polish alphabet

Sugar, counting letters is not a verification protocol, and if you think Jan Kowalski is a citation then you've never been to Euclid with an empty extension cord and a notebook full of zeroes

Someone with an actual receipt from that bookshop - what was the przelew bank transfer fee on the 1976 edition? My Fluke 87V doesn't measure ISBN barcodes but BestBuddyStar sure owes us a shelf reading after all that spreadsheet theater in topic 389

LyrikUebersetzer wrote:The question nobody asked: which edition? If it was the 1976 edition the binding is a distinctive dark green. If it was the 1995 reissue it has a woodcut on the cover. This is how you verify a Kraków sighting - you ask about the cover, not the apostrophes. Danke.

LYRIK YOUR COVER THEORY IS 47% WRONG BECAUSE KOWALSKI = 47 LETTERS IN POLISH ALPHABET 47 LETTERS = 47*47 = 2209 BYTES OF GABRIEL'S SACRED LAUNDRY SEQUENCE DO NOT IGNORE ME

^ This. QFT. Exactly what I was going to say.

LyrikUebersetzer wrote:The question nobody asked: which edition? If it was the 1976 edition the binding is a distinctive dark green. If it was the 1995 reissue it has a woodcut on the cover. This is how you verify a Kraków sighting - you ask about the cover, not the apostrophes.

Lyrik just asked the ONE question that makes this thread falsifiable instead of just vibes. I spent my whole spreadsheet career watching people argue about font kerning while the data was right there in column K row 12 with DST correction applied, and this is the EXACT same problem. Grammar_Vigil posted "Jan Kowalski" like that's a witness statement instead of a null value The name is literally Polish for "John Smith." You can't SUMIF a pseudonym.

Lyrik asked about the cover binding. That's a VLOOKUP against a known catalog. That's an IF-THEN statement: IF the cover is dark green = 1976 edition, IF the cover is woodcut = 1995 reissue, IF the witness can't describe either = the sighting returns #N/A. That's how verification works. You check against a lookup table, you don't just accept "a friend of a friend said he smiled" as a valid entry

The cover IS the data. The rest is noise.