The first part of the article discusses the popularity of editing courses at Polish universities and colleges in the last several years; it focuses on different fields of studies, e.g. law, history, librarianship, or Polish studies. Unfortunately, these courses are often limited to basic editor’s skills; the author expresses an opinion that, if they are not accompanied by advanced studies on literature and language, the professional success of the graduates cannot be guaranteed.
The second part is devoted to the problems of textual criticism and scholarly editing in Poland nowadays. The author discusses the latest editions of important Polish writers and the most urgent needs in this domain. Another topic touched upon are the transcription rules of old Polish texts. The last part presents and discusses perspectives of the electronic edition: it may attain a high level of attractiveness and value if it becomes something more than just an image of the printed edition on the screen, something that cannot be simply printed out.

Scholarly editing is a highly desirable and practical discipline. Being essential to philology, it now exists in different cultural, technological, economic, and organizational conditions. Obviously, it is possible to separate quintessentially scientific issues from so-called technical problems. Such separation does not demand vast knowledge, which does not interest or concern us, and gives the opportunity to justify potential mistakes. If some scholars’ attitude towards scholarly editing remains unchanged, it will lead us to stagnation and result in the long-lasting absence of unabridged editions of works by Polish classics.

The article discusses the most important needs of the scholarly editing of old Polish literature (new model of critical edition, the rules of transcription, new manual editing, the assessment of editions etc.).

An important and valuable phenomenon within the field of Polish studies is the emergence of a specialization – or even a faculty – of editing. This specialization can – or even should – appear on many classic faculties, as the need of editing, that is, the need to critically record and disseminate the results of research is inscribed into the ‘intellectual code’ of every faculty.

The article discusses the negative phenomena in Polish scholarly editing of literary works: protracting for decades or abandoning at all the scholarly editions of the classical Polish writers’ collected works; excessive acribia in critical apparatus; vexatious meticulousness accompanied by serious and numerous errors in the commentaries..

The article discusses difficulties in tracing Old Polish phonetics in an early printed text. It demonstrates the importance of rediscovering the Old Polish phonetics and, at the same time, the limits of such endeavour. The linguistic features are shown to melt with the conventional ways of printing certain words. These conventions have to do with graphic aspects of the text rather than with the real language. The problem is presented primarily by using Old Polish loanwords as an example.

The article focuses on the description of old print as a graphic project. It emphasizes three aspects of the book: its contents, function and form. It shows a proposal for analysis including print structure and typography. The structure includes: the title page, the publishing framework, additional materials and the main text. In the analysis of typography attention is paid to the typographic means of expression: font, printed surface, light, colour, typographic layout, format, highlighted elements, decorations and illustrations. The design elements, materials used for the book, especially the paper, and the printing technique are also very important.

The article discusses the origins of one of the most renown poetic volumes by Anna Kamieńska, A White Manuscript. Today, the history of this book can be reconstructed only partially, on the basis of two poetic notebooks from 1968–1970. Reading A White Manuscript in the context of those two manuscripts makes it possible to see the metamorphoses of particular poems (e.g. blurring of the tropes leading to cycles appearing inside the volume); it also allows us to discover that at the end of the 1960s there appeared in Kamieńska’s verses motifs that became important in her later poetry. It was while the poet was working on A White Manuscript that her fully original vision of corporeality emerged, together with a poetic image which received its defi nitive shape in Kamieńska’s last poem.

This article analyses the transformation of the idea of codex from the Antiquity, through the modern concepts of manuscript and printed volume, to its current digital form and digital repositories as Google Books or JSTOR. The author situates the process of digitization of books within a rich historical context and explores the influence of new media on the contemporary methods of reading, writing, publishing and storing information. He offers a critical analysis of the policies adopted by the largest libraries with regard to their digital collections as well as the consequences of digitization for academic publishing. This essay also attempts to show the tangible consequences of our growing familiarity with digital editions, for as useful and democratic as they are, they also make us forget the material aspect of the historical sources, e.g. their tangibility, size and format, as well as their sensual qualities which cannot be transmitted through the digital medium.

The review discusses the Polish translation of Alfredo Stussi’s manual Introduzione agli studi di filologia italiana, edited by the Gdańsk publishing house “słowo/obraz terytoria” in 2011. The reviewer starts out by emphasizing that such publications are needed for familiarizing Polish students with textual criticism abroad. It is interesting that in the first chapter Stussi includes some general information on the book as an object, discussing parchment, paper, script, structure of codex, printing techniques etc.; such elementary knowledge is scarce in Polish manuals of textual scholarship. In the next chapters, the Italian author discusses witnesses of the text, errors, kinds of textual variants, and methods of textual criticism, placing emphasis on stemmatic procedures and studying the originals (autographs, prints edited with the participation of the author). Other ways of dealing with the text (e.g. copy-text, the best text) are only mentioned by Stussi; the reviewer’s opinion is that it makes the book less useful for Polish students. His other critical remarks concern the translation of some technical terms into Polish, and especially the literal translation of the title of the last chapter: Filologia d’autore (Polish Filologia autorska), which is vague. Moreover, the edition lacks the bibliographic information necessary for the Polish reader.
In the conclusion the reviewer recommends Stussi’s book only to the most interested students.

The first review deals with Ann Blair’s very interesting book on managing scholarly information up to the early modern era. A concise summary of Blair’s most important ideas is accompanied by a brief commentary underscoring the book’s merits and shortly referring to some of its more debatable details.
The second review contains a brief summary of Anthony Grafton’s fascinating new book covering the work of book correctors and editors in the first two and a half centuries of print. The work done by one of the best scholars in the field of intellectual history is based mainly on case studies and leads to a conclusion that five hundred years ago publishing posed almost exactly the same problems as it does today.

Moje zdziwienia (My Wonderments) is a column authored by Henryk Markiewicz, professor emeritus of the Jagiellonian University, and one of the most outstanding Polish historians and theoreticians of literature. In his articles, which have been appearing in the „Wielogłos” magazine since 2008, professor Markiewicz offers a critical discussion on selected publications devoted to literary studies, comments on current events associated with academic life, engages in polemics and poses questions addressed to authors of academic papers and popularizing articles; he unceasingly demands respect for standards of academic professionalism, competence, diligence and responsibility for the views and opinions expressed