Zagadnienie kształtu typograficznego w badaniach dawnej książki polskiej

The purpose of this paper is to present the problem of typographic design in the studies on Polish books printed until the 18th century. Although some of the ideas of Polish bibliologists have closely corresponded with new directions in French and Anglo-American bibliography, they have never resulted in such books as: Apparition du livre by Febvre-Martin, Gutenberg Galaxy by McLuhan, Printing Press as an Agent of Change by Eisenstein or Histoire de l’édition française. In Polish book studies, the issue of typography was raised essentially to confirm or establish the provenance of a print or to demonstrate the existence of many variants of an edition. In the second decade of the 20th century, in opposition to the ideas represented e.g. by Jan Ptaśnik, who postulated mainly the examination of historical documents, Kazimierz Piekarski worked out the so-called “typographic method” of book studies, which consisted in the analysis, description and creating the catalogue of printing types and typographic material employed in the examined prints. This method was successfully used in the series Polonia Typographica Saeculi Sedecimi, which Piekarski initialised in 1936. While the idea to evaluate and compare the aesthetic value of production of different printers were present in Polish bibliography, they could not, nevertheless, be realised before the second world war. In the second half of the 20th century researchers focused, among others questions, on: paper, bookbinding, readers, publicity, musical prints, bookselling, history of libraries and printers, but the issue of typographic design was only discussed as an exception. Making an attempt to characterise and estimate the visual aspect of Polish books printed before the end of the 18th century requires difficult study not only in bibliography, but also in the history of literature, culture and art. Works such as: Encyklopedia wiedzy o książce, Słownik pracowników książki polskiej,Drukarze dawnej Polski, a recently published bibliography of books printed by Franciszek Cezary the older, as well as already mentioned Polonia Typographica... and numerous articles (some of them concerning precisely e.g. title-pages or printers’ devices) remain a useful source of knowledge. However, Polish scientific vocabulary in this subject is still deficient and sometimes a researcher could find it indispensable to create a new term him- or herself. The author of this paper had a similar experience during her studies on the typography of prints published in sixteenth-century Cracow by Florian Ungler and Maciej Wirzbięta. The other problem she had to deal with was the creation of an original database, which allowed her to collect, research and present data in a much simpler, faster and more comfortable way. Comparative studies of selected prints published in Cracow in the first and the second half of the 16th century have shown a development of local typography and book design during this period, including changes in book architecture, typographic material and page layout. They also indicated the introduction and perfection of multiple helpful elements of a book, like pagination or foliation, indexes, errata, notes etc., as well as an establishment of some patterns of composition for editions de luxe and “series”. Despite many attempts, including those mentioned in this paper, the issue of typographic design of Polish books printed before the 18th century remains mostly unknown. Simultaneously, the general interest in modern book design in Poland has greatly increased over the last few years and creating the layout of one’s own book has become more and more popular. It is therefore extremely important to study the art of our predecessors and try to understand what they wanted to teach us in their own language of “black-art”.