Polskie historyczne księgozbiory domowe na Śląsku Cieszyńskim (XX wiek)

Abstract

The issue of private book collections in Cieszyn Silesia in 20th century was approached from the perspective of its being one of the components of the culture of the region. It allowed of discovering the reasons of establishing private book collections and showing their functioning and development in specific socio-political and cultural circumstances. The content of the dissertation was presented in four chapters in which the issue of establishing the book collections was discussed. It presented the issues of development of Polish national consciousness in 19th and at the beginning of 20th century. It also showed the influence of political situation on establishing centres of Polish cultural life including private book collections. In the dissertation there basic issues connected with functioning of book collections in 20th century were presented: collecting the volumes and the extent of their systematisation, their characteristic in terms of number and chronological range, language analysis and the description of topical range of collection and the way of their usage indicating the function of the library. The analysis of the collection was more aimed at working out a synthetic outline which would show the similarities and differences of bibliophile and librarian-like attitudes and behaviours of their owners than at the characterisation of the individual and particular features of the specified collections. It was more of a socio-historical approach than a description of the book collections as historical phenomena. The last two chapters are of monographic character. They analyse in a detailed way Jan Broda’s and Józef Pilch’s libraries.