The collection of the Academic Library of the Polish Academy of Art and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences contains five volumes of documents titled “Education Nationale” (book number 2220, vol. 1–5). One of the volumes is held by the Princes Czartoryski Library. The materials are neither organised in chronological order nor by theme. Some threads related to the dissolution of the Jesuit Order as well as the establishment and activity of the Commission of National Education and the Polish-Lithuanian Commission for Distribution, responsible for distributing assets of the Jesuit Order for educational purposes under the Commission of National Education supervision, can be separated. What is worth to pay attention to are the letters of ex-Jesuits to king Stanisław August Poniatowski as well as other pieces of correspondence, a variety of draft laws, practical issues on goods and financial matters, minutes on meetings of different assemblies, or attempts to establish a position on numerous current issues. Eight handwritten maps showing distribution of schools supervised by the Commission of National Education within departments, as well as numerous universals and decrees are also worth noting.

The paper presents the biographical and genealogical aspects of Sylwester Joanelle de Telvana’s life and activity. It also discusses the heraldic issues concerning his family, originating in Gandino near Bergamo. Joanelli, who originally was probably a Viennese merchant, moved to Upper Hungary. He worked closely with his  cousin, Johann Andreas Joanelli, from whom he received a lease of Smolniki in Slovakia along with its ore mines. He was also one of the greatest copper traders in Kraków. In 1664, he married Katarzyna Formankowiczówna (Furmankowiczówna), the daughter of Jan, a councillor in Kraków. Around 1670, he leased the Dunajec castle in Niedzica. As a devout Catholic and Habsburgs’ supporter, he used to come into conflict with Hungarian Protestants. Forced to leave Smolnik, he settled in Niedzica. In 1683 he was fighting the Kuruc army under Imre Tököly for five weeks after which he fell into captivity. Redeemed from captivity, he made his way to Kraków, where he died after a few months. His wife funded him a splendid gravestone in the Italian Chapel located in the Church of St. Francis in Kraków. It still exists. Sylwester’s descendants owned the properties in Niedzica for next several dozen years, selling them out gradually after they moved to castellum in Łapsze.

The Special Collections Department of the PAU and PAN Scientific Library in Krakow stores the correspondence of the eminent Indo-European linguist, professor of the Jagiellonian University, Jan Michał Rozwadowski (1867–1935). The collection includes the letters and postcards of Jan Szczepan Otrębski (1889–1971) and covers the period of thirteen years (1917–1930). It contains a lot of information on the considerations and doubts of the future Baltic linguist J. Otrębski, who at the moment was just starting his scientific career. Particularly clear is the thread of doubts about the rightness of choosing a career in science, and the lack of faith in one’s own abilities and the usefulness for science that often appears. The author of the letters repeatedly seeks advice and asks for help from professor J.M. Rozwadowski, who was then highly respected in the world of Indo-European studies. In the letters we can also find a considerable amount of the author’s reflections on various issues of Indo-European linguistics that bother him, which were later recognized as an innovative approach in the study of Baltic languages.

The Academic Library of the Polish Academy of Art and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences collection contains a great number of works by a poet Kajetan Koźmian (1771–1856). Especially valuable are the authorial manuscripts of the writer’s works.
The paper deals with some chosen autographs of K. Koźmian’s poems available in the Academic Library of the Polish Academy of Art and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences. An annex has been added at the end – a publication of K. Koźmian’s poem Cantata for the Coronation of Napoleon after the author’s manuscript which has yet to become a subject of any academic research.
The paper discusses the following authorial manuscripts of K. Koźmian’s poems with some elements of analysis: To Zygmunt Krasiński (Poem I), To Wincent Krasiński in 1843, An Anacreontic to S. Małachowski, Cantata for the Coronation of Napoleon, On Hegel’s Philosophy in 1848, 77 years of age, A Poem to Franciszek Wężyk on the Road to Karlsbad spa.
The paper refers to a research on some manuscripts of K. Koźmian’s poems done by a literary historian Piotr Żbikowski (1935–2011).

As shown in the presented material, the contribution of Polish botanists into a scientific research on flora and fungi of Eastern Carpathians up to 1918 was significant. In spite of very limited funds, extremely difficult and undeveloped terrain and difficulties in organising fieldwork, a more or less advanced research had been conducted. They resulted in the publication of some high level scientific papers usually printed in the journals of the Cracow Scientific Society and then the Academy of Learning. The input of the Botanical Section of the Physiographical Commission of the Academy of Learning should be underlined as well. Researchers related to those institutions have greatly enhanced the knowledge of plants and fungi of the discussed region, thus vastly contributing to both Polish and European academic achievement.
It should also be noted that except for Polish researchers, the issue of botanic research in Eastern Carpatians within the discussed period has also been dealt with by foreign academics from: Austria, Germany, Hungary.

The paper reminds the profile of a respected religious reformer and social activist whose life was also connected to Egypt. From 1902 to 1904, due to ill-health, he visited Egypt twice as he required climatotherapy. At that time he stayed in Helwan, a popular resort near Cairo. During his treatment, he was probably residing in Wanda Bilińska’s guesthouse, where residents from the territories of former-day Poland met. The stay in Egypt made a huge impression on Wysłouch. An ample evidence of his fascination with heritage and monuments of ancient Egypt is the neatly published volume, issued soon after the author’s return to Poland, titled From the Land of Ruins (Warsaw 1906); what is also interesting is its graphic design, using Egyptian motives, created by Franciszek Siedlecki (1867–1934). The volume, containing the author’s reflections on existence and prose poetry, signals the state of his soul, which was filled with loneliness and bitter sadness. Its content also suggests that the author had visited most of the country, from the Giza Pyramid Complex to the city of Aswan. Egypt influenced him to such a great degree that he called the country his second homeland. He also took his pen-name “Szech” (ar. Sheikh) at that time. Having returned to his motherland, Wysłouch became a keen supporter of working-class protests (1905). He also strongly backed the reforms in the Ethical and Social Teachings of the Church; he published numerous brochures in which he described an utopian programme that would connect Christianity with Communism and Polish patriotism; he decided to leave Church in 1908. After Poland regained its independence in 1918, Wysłouch, as a public servant, played a vital role in organising and introducing the system of public disability pensions and retirement insurance in the reborn Poland.

The present material constitutes the ninth installment of the series introducing Japanese documents preserved with Bronisław Piłsudski’s archives in the Academic Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Lettres (PAU) and Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) in Cracow and includes photocopies of a letter in German (with its envelope indicating the addressee and the sender in Japanese, its decipherment transcript, and translation into Polish) dated , sent, together with an attached book, to Bronisław residing at that time in Tokyo by Dr. Fujihiko Sekiba, a renowned physician famous all over Japan, long-standing head of the Hokkaido Medical Association and a hospital (both founded by himself), but also medicine historian, anthropologist and one of the pioneers in Japanese ethnomedicine. The book of his own authorship was an extensive monograph on Ainu medicine studied also by Bronisław himself. The paper provides essential data concerning Sekiba’s biography and his legacy (especially, his scientific publications and the hospital still existing and considered one of the leading medical institutions in Hokkaido), and the book in question itself, with an appeal to make every effort possible to trace and find the copy of the book (possibly with some personal dedication) sent, but so far unidentified: Piłsudski, a dedicated collector of “things Ainu”, never easily parted with such items). The letter and the book mailed to Bronisław demonstrate how famous Piłsudski was in Japan as an Ainu researcher as early as 1906 (six years prior to the publication, in Cracow, of Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore that secured for him the eternal reference in the annals of academic research worldwide. Mentioned have also been certain related publications on Ainu medicine by Piłsudski.

Maksymilian Cercha (1818–1907), whose life was linked to Kraków, was born in an assimilated Italian family and is known as a drawer, cataloguer of gravestones in the churches of Kraków and a co-author of a publication titled the Monuments of Kraków. In this paper however, his Tatra-themed paintings are discussed, which are yet to be included in the Art History. Cercha was Jan Nepomucen Głowacki’s student, who established Tatra mountains themed landscape painting in Kraków. In the summertime, he used to take his students to the Tatra mountains where he would rent an inn in Stare Kościelisko for an atelier.
Cercha painted his Tatra landscapes in the period from 1849 to 1860. These are:
–– Morskie Oko, oil on cardboard (31 x 23 cm), 1849;
–– View from Mała Łąka, oil on canvas (38 x 31 cm), 1853;
–– Mill in Chochołów, oil on cardboard (22 x 28 cm), 1853;
–– Sucha Woda Valley as seen from Brzeziny, oil on cardboard (32 x 26 cm), 1857;
–– View of the Giewont mountain, oil on cardboard (23 x 30 cm), c. 1860;
–– “Carpathians”, watercolour (22 x 14), 1860.
Except View from Mała Łąka, held by the Tatra Museum in Zakopane, all pictures belong to the family. Moreover, there are three pencil on paper drawings depicting Zakopane and Hamry from the period of 1855–1857 held by the National Museum in Kraków.
Cercha, modelling on Głowacki, used to oil paint on cardboard by firstly sketching on location and then finishing the picture back in Kraków. He used to replicate the themes drew out by Głowacki, such as the view of Morskie Oko lake. He continued the Cracovian tradition of Tatra landscape painting, whic, thanks to Głowacki, Franz Steinfeld the Younger’s student, derives from the Austrian landscape painting of Biedermeier period.

The paper contains an excerpt of a manuscript by Anna Jałbrzykowska (1908–1990) titled: “The Stories of a Lost Nest – the Year of God”. The text was written in 1972 and soon afterwards it was bought to be added into the manuscript collection of our Library, in which the author used to work for a short time before the outbreak of War. It comprises of a description of pre-war economics, daily life and house practices present in the manor house in Ujazd, located 14 km from Kraków, owned by the Jałbrzykowscy family since 1884 until 1945, when it was taken from them by the Polish communists. After this confiscation, the author, who studied humanities, was for many years working in the Jagiellonian Library, where she was accepted as an employee despite her then improper social background and a close family relationship between her and a prominent priest, archbishop of Vilnius Romuald Jałbrzykowski. The value of the presented source is both its recollective nature and interesting persons who visited the Jałbrzykowscy’s manor (priest professor Tadeusz Kruszyński, Tetmajerowie, Jan Bisanz) as well as the nostalgic, literary nature of the memories: the image of the world and lifestyle typical for the nobility living in a manor house which are gone, not so much due to natural economic development but because of the Polish communists rule.

The paper presents some selected aspects regarding the work of a Polish emigrant writer Zygmunt Haupt (1907–1975). Its aim is to provide an interpretation of the forms of remembrance contained in some of the short stories as well as the influence of the writer’s biography on his prose. In the second part, attention is given to the philosophical and cultural contexts in which the author’s works may be placed. Moreover, the linguistic elements present in the quoted short stories are also described. The author of the paper attempted to organise the biographical information about the writer as well as to depict the historical background of his literary activity.

The article aims at an insight into the issues of fantasy, horror, panaesthetics and antiaesthetics in the views and works by the early twentieth century American writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Referring to some definitions formulated by various theoreticians, the author of this article firstly explains some basic terms such as: fantasy and horror. Afterwards, he takes a close look into the concepts of panaesthetics and antiaesthetics as well as some other related notions. The essay focuses both on presenting the profile of H.P. Lovecraft and his ideas in the fields of philosophy, arts and literature. Moreover, it intends to outline some advices he made on writing weird stories and building the atmosphere of fear. The author of the article attempts also to characterize H.P. Lovecraft’s literarily work in order to juxtapose the writer’s views and writing with the ideas behind the concepts of panaesthetics and antiaesthetics. Finally, the author tries to answer the question whether H.P. Lovecraft is to be seen more as a representative of a panaesthetic or rather antiaesthetic viewpoint.

The purpose of this publication is to draw attention to the scientific and historical value of the literary achievements of architects associated with The Lviv University of Technology on the basis of copies held in the collections of The Cracow University of Technology Library. Due to the extensive source material, the works of eleven selected architects were discussed. The characterization will take the form of library resources analysis, supported by source research. The study focuses solely on pre-1945 collections. The most interesting publications will be discussed in terms of their historical and substantive value.