Humanities and Social Sciences

Libri Gedanenses

Content

Libri Gedanenses | 2018 | vol. 35

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Abstract

1905 was a milestone year for the Gdansk Municipal Library – its collections were relocated for the very first time in their history to a building erected especially for the purpose, and the entire institution stepped into the 20th century and the world of modern librarianship: a planned collection, scientific cataloguing and indexing, and streamlined circulation. The article presents the specific nature of work at the Library as a Prussian and German facility, as an institution of the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk) and during the two world wars, and shows how it changed over the period of forty years under the supervision of its subsequent directors – Otton Günther, Friedrich Schwarz, and Hermann Hassbargen. In 1945 the century-and-a-half long period of the history of the Gdansk Library as Danziger Stadtbibliothek, the successor of Bibliotheca Senatus Gedanensis and the predecessor of the Gdansk PAS Library, came to an end.
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Authors and Affiliations

Dagmara Binkowska
1

  1. PAN Biblioteka Gdańska, Dział Druków XIX i 1. poł. XX wieku
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Abstract

On 9 April 1945, Polish authorities officially took over one of the most valuable library holdings in Europe collected at the Danziger Stadtbibliothek (previously Bibliotheca Senatus Gedanensis). The most important tasks included the protection of the building and the bringing back of the most valuable items which towards the end of the war were taken away from Gdansk. They were found in the cellars of the Old Town Hall, in the Malbork Castle, and in the Pelplin Seminary.
The team of devoted librarians headed by dr. Marian Pelczar, director, spent the first year of their work on the tidying of the interior of the building, cleaning and shelving the relocated book collections and safeguarding the abandoned libraries in Gdansk and in its vicinity. Despite the extremely difficult conditions, it was as early as on 22 June 1946 that the readers and Polish science were provided with access to the Library’s resources which, in particular as regards Polonica, to that date were little known to scholars, not only Polish ones.
The tasks of the reborn Municipal Library were determined in its Organisational Charter adopted by the College of the City Board on 25 April 1946. The facility had a double nature: it functioned both as an educational library (the centre of a network of public reading rooms and libraries) and a scientific library (which included an information and bibliography centre). These two directions of activity determined the history of the Library until the end of 1954, when its scientific department was taken over by the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the educational one was merged with the Provincial Library.
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Authors and Affiliations

Maria Pelczar
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Abstract

The article attempts to present the functioning of the Gdansk Library under the patronage of the Polish Academy of Sciences. As of 1 January 1955, the scientific department of the Municipal Library in Gdansk was taken over by the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the thus established separate institution received new statutes regulating the activity of the Library and the scope of the development of its collections. Until the four-hundredth anniversary of the Gdansk Library (the establishment of Bibliotheca Senatus Gedanensis), descriptions of the history of the Gdansk PAS Library were mainly based on reports drawn up by the heads of the institution. It is on their basis that one may trace the difficult space and storage and warehouse conditions in which employees of the Library carried out their statutory tasks, with the constantly growing collections and the increasing load of services. The paper also reports the scientific works of employees of the Library as well as the editorial activity of the institution, including works documenting the collections of the Library. An important way of familiarising the general public with knowledge on the Gdansk Library and its collections was through exhibitions and displays organized by employees of the information and special collections departments.
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Authors and Affiliations

Helena Dzienis
1
ORCID: ORCID

  1. PAN Biblioteka Gdańska, Dział Zbiorów Specjalnych, Pracownia Numizmatów i Ekslibrisów
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Abstract

The article presents a selection of 15th century printed matters on the topic of broadly understood medicine, which are currently kept by the Gdansk PAS Library. They testify to the Gdansk culture in the area of the knowledge on health and hygiene in the 15th century and in a slightly later period. The majority of the said printed matters originate from the collections of Gdansk church libraries, while the presence of items of other origin (private owners) makes it possible to trace the road medical incunabula came to Gdansk to finally find their way to the resources of the Gdansk library.
The author of the article explains the modesty of the Gdansk medical literature resources with the fact that there was not a single university functioning in the city by the River Motlawa in the early modern period. The presence of this kind of incunabula in church libraries and private collections of books indicates that the knowledge they contained was applied for personal use rather than in professional medical practice, although some of the items in question originate from book collections belonging to doctors.
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Authors and Affiliations

Beata Gryzio
1
ORCID: ORCID

  1. PAN Biblioteka Gdańska, Dział Zbiorów Specjalnych, Pracownia Starych Druków
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Abstract

The engraving presenting a view of the interior of the Library of the Council of the City of Gdansk was made in 1687 – just like the other 56 engravings showing the city in Reinhold Curicke’s work Der Stadt Dantzig historische Beschreibung (Amsterdam and Gdansk 1687). The author of the article analysed the view in terms of its style, technique and iconography. Reaching back to 1596, she presented the circumstances in which the Library of the Council of the City of Gdansk was established in its initial location, referring to the political situation in the Commonwealth after Sigismund III Vasa, a supporter of the counter-reformation directed at the Protestant Gdansk, ascended to the throne. Analysing the artistic value of the view on the interior of the Library, the author accentuated the appropriate decorum, differentiating the engraving in question from Curicke’s other illustrations forming a part of his work. According to the author, the above resulted from the fact that the city authorities wanted to highlight the role of child-rearing, education and science in the development of Gdansk. The message was expressed in a baroquising style allegorizing the image of science. It is this intention which makes the view of the interior of the Library different from the other realistic views of the structures, fragments of the city and suburban areas of Gdansk.
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Authors and Affiliations

Krystyna Jackowska
1

  1. PAN Biblioteka Gdańska, Dział Zbiorów Specjalnych, Pracownia Grafiki
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Abstract

Johann Fidalke (1703–1763), a Gdansk pastor and a gymnasium teacher, gathered a substantial collection of books comprising more than 10,000 volumes. After his death, the books were sold during four auctions, and the valuable collection was dispersed. However, owing to an auction catalogue kept in the collections of the Gdansk PAS Library, we may recreate the content of the Gdansk pastor’s collection. Its most considerable part was made up of different editions of the Holy Bible – with a total of 95 editions in 156 volumes. The article provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the said Bibles, focusing on the presentation of their languages as well as the places and times of their publication, and their bindings. The article is accompanied by an index, in which the different editions of the Bible in Fidalke’s collection are identified and catalogued in line with the contemporary standards, on the basis of the rudimentary information given in the auction catalogue.
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Authors and Affiliations

Maria Otto-Michalska
1

  1. PAN Biblioteka Gdańska, Dział Zbiorów Specjalnych, Pracownia Starych Druków
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Abstract

The article presents a collection of 174 glass negatives kept by the Gdansk PAN Library, displaying photographic documentation of the removal of defensive ramparts in the north-east parts of Gdansk between 1908 and 1928. The text is an attempt at the recreation of the history of this unique collection – the circumstances of its origin and its fate both before and after the Second World War. Arranging the collection in chronological order, the author follows the footprints of an anonymous photographer, recreating the old picture of the ramparts, water courses and sluices in the eastern part of the city, and recording the changes which affected the space of the suburban district of Knipawa (Rudno) and the settlement Althof. On the basis of the photographs, she decodes the places from which the photographs were taken, which is often down to traces left by their unknown author; she also offers a thesis concerning the identity of the photographer.
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Authors and Affiliations

Marta Pawlik-Flisikowska
1

  1. PAN Biblioteka Gdańska, Dział Zbiorów Specjalnych, Pracownia Fotografii
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Abstract

Since 1987, the poets Teresa Ferenc and Zbigniew Jankowski have been gradually donating their substantial archives containing personal documents, diplomas and honourable mentions, photographs, hand-written versions of their published works, notes with ideas concerning changes to their works, correspondence, and press cuttings from the period between the 1940s until the beginning of the 21st century, to the collections of the Gdansk PAN Library. At the moment, the Manuscripts Workshop keeps about 600 manuscript accession units; the most recent materials date to 2016.
The extensive correspondence of both poets may become a source material for research into the history of Polish literature in Pomerania in the second half of the 20th century. It makes up one of the most sizeable epistolary materials in the letter collections kept by the Library. Among the correspondents of the Sopot poets there are names who have found a perpetual place in the canon of Polish literature, such as Anna Kamieńska, Tadeusz Różewicz, Wisława Szymborska and Fr. Jan Twardowski.
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Authors and Affiliations

Sabina Drożdziecka
1

  1. PAN Biblioteka Gdańska, Dział Zbiorów Specjalnych, Pracownia Rękopisów

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Archival issues

Bibliography of the contents of Libri Gedanenses volumes 1-35 (1968-2018) is available at https://bgpan.gda.pl/o-bibliotece/libri-gedanenses/

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The papers undergo a double blind review process. Each of them is reviewed by two reviewers selected in a manner excluding a conflict of interests with the author. Reviewers recommend that the reviewed papers be accepted, suggesting the introduction of corrections, or that they be rejected. Reviews are made in writing and are completed with a clear evaluation of a given work under review. It is on their basis that the final decisions are taken by the Editorial Board.

Non-scientific texts – such as reviews, polemics, obituaries and reports – are in principle not reviewed, although they may be referred for a review.

A full list of reviewers is given in the appropriate volume of the journal.


Reviewers

Tom 40 (2023)

dr hab. Bogdan Burliga (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr hab. Sławomir Kościelak (Uniwersytet Gdański)
prof. dr hab. Krzysztof Lewalski (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr hab. Gabriela Majewska (Uniwersytet Gdański)
prof. dr hab. Mieczysław Nurek
dr hab. Iwona Sakowicz-Tebinka (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr hab. Marek Stażewski
prof. dr hab. Tadeusz Stegner (Uniwersytet Gdański)
prof. dr hab. Jacek Tebinka (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr Anna Żeglińska (Uniwersytet Gdański)

Tom 39 (2022)

dr Zbigniew I. Brzostowski (Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Gdańsku)
dr hab. Bogdan Burliga (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr hab. Karol Łopatecki (Uniwersytet w Białymstoku)
dr Anna Łysiak-Łątkowska (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr hab. Gabriela Majewska (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr hab. Radosław Skrycki (Uniwersytet Szczeciński)
dr hab. Iwona Sakowicz-Tebinka (Uniwersytet Gdański)

Tom 38 (2021)

dr Zbigniew I. Brzostowski (Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Gdańsku)
dr hab. Bogdan Burliga (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr Anna Łysiak-Łątkowska (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr hab. Gabriela Majewska (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr hab. Iwona Sakowicz-Tebinka (Uniwersytet Gdański)
dr hab. Andrzej Woziński (Uniwersytet Gdański)


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