Going back to the exhibit - it became clear in the course of putting it together, that for the reasons of clarity and production the exhibit should contain no more than 50 pages. This realization caused a lot of logistical anguish. Do we choose articles that focused on depicting Poland's road to democracy? Or simply on those that were best written? Or should we select the pages with lots of photos? Or those containing the largest number of articles?

We spent several weeks going through 92 pages containing 2000 headlines. What stuck out was the number of headlines starting with "unprecedented, unique, for the first time in history." For the first time a Pole becomes the Pope, for the first time in 500 years, the Vatican vote did not go to an Italian. For the first time an independent trade union was formed in a communist country, democratic elections were held, and the leader of the communist party sat down to talk with the leader of an independent trade union and the head of the Catholic Church. For the first time since the end of WWII, an anti-communist dissident becomes the primer minister of an Eastern European country.

Faced with all that, we decide to add another category to the selection process - Poland's Unique Role - to narrow the choice. The 600 plus articles that turned up in this category sent us back to revisiting the criteria, leading us back to where it all started - the journalists who wrote the stories.

We asked the six correspondents who filed vast numbers of front page articles to indicate the ones that they themselves felt very strongly about. Their picks in effect determined the majority of the front pages included in the exhibit. Asking the correspondents' help in the selection turned out to be doubly becoming: not only did they play an active part in the momentous events of that decade, it was their desire to meet in Warsaw this fall that inspired us to create the exhibit .

Unfortunately, most of the original front pages had disappeared. Even the archives at the three papers keep only microfilm copies.

In that decade alone, the three papers alone printed about 5 billion issues. Our task was to find the sixty we selected. Despite the fact that each front page was issued in millions, it's almost impossible to track them down. Most of them are gone with the wind. The majority of the pages included in the exhibit are the scanned versions of microfilm copies.