The auditorium would have an exhibition venue and a lobby. The architects initially drew up plans for a library to be built exactly where the camp house had stood and an auditorium in place of the chapel. The farmhouse and chapel were therefore torn down to make way for a more ambitious construction project, a new complex that would respect the original layout of the different buildings. Vera turned to the architects Vincent Mangeat and Pierre Wahlen, associates at a firm in Nyon, but it quickly became apparent that the buildings were in too great a state of disrepair to make appropriate use of them. She was nevertheless attached to the memory of Bois Désert and initially considered restoring the existing buildings without carrying out major changes. When Vera began thinking about renovating the site, Bois Désert had already been standing empty for several years. Extensive games had been played on the playground’s covered terrace and baptisms celebrated in the charming little chapel. The Lausanne parish had regularly hosted a camp at the site, and the children of the village of Montricher often spent the day there on school outings. After the untimely death of Jan Michalski in 2002, Vera Michalski-Hoffmann carried on with the project and the Jan Michalski Foundation was created in 2004, so that their common commitment to those who work with the written word and to the very practice of reading will not disappear.īoasting a large house and a chapel that were joined by a covered walkway, the Bois Desert summer camp had made a deep impression on many of the region’s inhabitants. Vera and Jan Michalski had been living in the village of Montricher in Vaud since 1983 when, to broaden their publishing activities, they began to think of building a literary center, a place that would foster exchange and interaction in the unique natural setting offered by this region at the foot of the Jura Mountains. This publishing group has been active internationally in Europe for some time and today represents nearly a dozen publishers in a range of fields – literature, travel, essays, documents, music, ecology, visual arts, and creative hobbies. Over the years Groupe Libella took shape and grew in both size and importance. In Paris they reopened the historic Polish bookstore Librairie polonaise and acquired two other publishing houses, Éditions Phébus and Éditions Buchet-Chastel. They then founded Oficyna Literacka Noir sur Blanc in Warsaw in 1990, built around the Polish translation of Western writers like Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Paul Auster, Blaise Cendrars, Nicolas Bouvier, Manuel Vazquez Montalban, Lawrence Durrell, Donna Leon, Umberto Eco, and others. Driven by the conviction that the process of mutual understanding between peoples plays out in culture, they developed a catalogue of Slavic writers, both classic and contemporary, in French translation. Their ambition was to build literary bridges between Eastern and Western Europe.
In 1986 the two launched a publishing house in Switzerland, Éditions Noir sur Blanc.
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