The Polish History of the Library of Tyszkiewicz Family

Abstract

Part of the library of Benedict John Tyszkiewicz from Czerwony Dwór left the ancestral seat at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1918 a few thousand early printed books, mainly the ones from sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were stored in Sucha, in the manor house of the Branicki and Tarnowski families. During World War II, the collection was dispersed. In the 40’s of the twentieth century, part of it went to Krakow. Rest of the collection was divided among the other libraries in Poland, books mostly went to the Ossolineum collection in Wroclaw. Eventually Tyszkiewicz collection has been moved to the National Library in Warsaw. Currently, the collection consists of app. 3500 early printed books. In 2014 we made a query and gathered information on the presence of books from the discussed library in the Czerwony Dwór which are now kept in Poland. Apart from Warsaw, books are dispersed in several other institutions, for example in the Library of Silesia in Katowice. A few handwritten documents from the archives of the Czerwony Dwór are stored in the National Library in Warsaw. All documents were purchased at the antique auctions. Most of the surviving books are marked with a heraldic stamp of Tyszkiewicz family or ex-libris by B. J. Tyszkiewicz. The collection consists mainly of early printed books published in Latin, more rarely in German and Polish. Many of the books from the sixteenth century had been published in Krakow. These books are not thematically homogeneous. Mostly they concern the history, politics, theology, philosophy and literature.