Nero, Lula, Hegel, and the other office dogs feel right at home here. They’ve got their bowls, blankets, and lots of hands to pet them. This is not only the case today—apparently it was also the case a few decades ago, back when we were published as a weekly in Kraków. After all, how could you make a magazine without a dog under your desk? 

Przekrój has always been a big menagerie: from Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński’s “Green Goose” to Daniel Mróz’s spoiled cats. But only one animal joined the board of editors—Fafik the dog. He managed that trick back when he was a puppy, and he didn’t even have to sign anything. Things did not always go so smoothly when it came to his articles. “He’s one of my best authors, but the bastard just won’t learn how to hold a pen in his paw,” said Marian Eile, Przekrój’s legendary editor-in-chief, and Fafik’s caretaker. Despite the dog’s evident idleness (breed: almost a Scottish terrier) he kept his post in the editor’s office, right under the editor-in-chief’s desk, until his dying days, making up for his shortcomings with his talent for creating a light atmosphere, his general charm, and his antics. 

We cannot say he wrote nothing at all—that would be unjust. Since 1957, when he had turned eleven and had licked his share of the world, he co-created the Thought of Great People, Middling People, and Fafik the Dog column, in which the editors published his pearls of wisdom alongside such luminaries as Einstein and Horace. His name featured under such pearls of wisdom as: “We ought always to bark when it comes to what’s important,” or “Don’t believe other people’s words. Believe your nose,” or the contemplative “Having a bone means you must growl.” 

Apart from his bon mots, he could also paint. In a holiday issue he got a two-page spread for his colorful paw prints. As Eile explained, this was paw Tachisme, a variant of