Jan Walter of Chojnice (*about 1445, †1512), initially a vicar, and then a parson of St. Peter and Paul’s Church, as well as a secretary of Gdansk City Council, is one of the best known figures associated with the old book culture in Gdansk. The article describes one of the aspects of his bibliophilia: book covers marked with supralibros. It first discusses works by local bookbinders made for Walter, and then analyses a supralibros in the form of a miniature oval featuring the mark of a bibliophile (the head of a Negro) against the background of the European and local tradition of marking books in late Middle Ages. As a result, it is demonstrated that six from among the Gdansk citizen’s books we currently know, which contain the mark, were provided with it secondarily. This is mainly indicated by the non-typical locations of the supralibros – each one is in a way “squeezed in” between the regularly spaced elements of the blind embossing adornment of the covers.

The numerous cimelia of the Kórnik Library include Stanisław Sarnicki’s work Descriptio veteris ac novae Poloniae, printed by Aleksy Rodecki in Cracow in 1585. It is protected by a parchment binding with orientalising decoration marked with a supralibros dedicated by Jan Sienieński to King Stephen Báthory. In view of a scant number of the surviving bookbinding bathoriana, the paper provides a book cover-focused analysis of the work. It makes it possible to examine the binding against the Polish bookbinding art of the late 16th century, identify its maker, link it to other bindings of printed books from Báthory’s book collection, and picture the connections between the decoration of the covers and the illustrations of the publication the binding protected.

The cult of the book in Gdansk manifested itself in the numerous substantial private libraries, marked by the features and qualities of bibliophile facilities, as indicated by the artistic bindings, ex-libris and supralibros of their owners. After their owner’s death, many of the book collections of Gdansk bibliophiles were provided to the municipal library, of which the current Gdansk PAN Library is the heir and continuator. The books have historical bindings, represent a variety of styles and epochs, and many different adornment techniques. The majority of Gdansk patrician families and wealthy burghers belonging to the political, cultural, and scientific elite of the city had coats-of-arms granted to them by the Polish, Danish, or Swedish rulers, or Roman-German emperors. From among many volumes kept in the collection of the Gdansk Library and marked with coat-of-arms supralibros, sample prints from the collections of thirteen representatives of Gdansk bibliophiles were selected.

This paper is devoted to a precious sobiescianum from the Kórnik Library’s collection of manuscripts – the binding of a hand-written panegyric with emblems by Johann Jakob Rollos, dedicated to King John III Sobieski. This piece of bookbinding art is marked by its restrained although exquisite decoration centred around the monarch’s supralibros in the form of a monogram under a royal crown, encircled by palm branches. First, the binding is analysed in terms of its materials, technique, and decoration. Conclusions from the analysis were used to situate the work in the context of French 17th-c. bookbinding, which led to the conclusion that it is a classic example of an à la Duseuil (à la Du Seuil) binding, which has numerous counterparts in the output of French bookbinders of the Baroque era. The genesis of the form of the supralibros is then analysed, indicating French sample design books presenting inter alia designs of monograms. Analogies between the Sobieski’s supralibros and the French supralibros with a monogram or an escutcheon under a crown and encircled by palm branches or similar motifs turned out to be significant. Attention was also devoted to the genesis of the form of the marbled paper from which the endpapers were made. Finally, it was attempted to situate the book in the context of John III Sobieski’s book collection, from which only a handful of volumes have managed to survive until our own times. Attention was also paid to the issue of the royal monograms in Poland in the last years of the 17th century and the first decades of the 18th century.