The scope of the project carried out in the Kórnik Library in 2016-2019 included the set of incunabula kept in the facility. This paper sums up the works concerning this part of the book collection. The author presents new findings concerning the holdings, simultaneously indicating the need for further research on the oldest treasures of the European printing industry kept at the library established by Tytus Działyński.

The Kórnik Library is one of the oldest and most valuable establishments in Poland. By creating a library during the Partitions of Poland and collecting valuable old books and manuscripts, Tytus Działyński intended to save and foster Polish culture and traditions for posterity. Heir to Tytus – Jan Działyński – secured and expanded the Library. Having no heir himself, Jan Działyński left the Działyński inheritance to his nephew, Władysław Zamoyski, who continued his grandfather's and uncle's work. Just before his death, Władysław Zamoyski donated the entire inherited property to the Polish nation. In 1924, he established a Foundation meant to supervise the Library, a museum and the Institute of Dendrology. The Zakłady Kórnickie Foundation operated until 1953 when it was taken over by the Polish Academy of Sciences and has remained within its structure until today. The library continues assembling, developing and sharing its collections. The latest technologies have enabled us to provide the library and museum collections to the largest possible number of readers. The collections have been successively digitized and made available on the Digital Platform of the Kórnik Library created as part of the EU project POPC.02.03.01-IP.01-00-002/15 “Digital access to the resources of the Polish Academy of Sciences in the Library”.

The paper aims to give the results of initial research on the collection of incunabula from the St John’s church in Gdańsk. The collection constitutes significant part of PAN Biblioteka Gdańska. The author reconstructed the size and contents of the collection on the basis of the original church catalogues, marks of ownership and the physical details of the items. The books were gathered in the St John’s church from the time of the collections foundation until the 20th century. The paper establishes also the losses sustained by St John’s church’s library during World War II. Thanks to the incunabula’s content analysis the author determines the thematic focal points of the collection.

The article presents a selection of 15th century printed matters on the topic of broadly understood medicine, which are currently kept by the Gdansk PAS Library. They testify to the Gdansk culture in the area of the knowledge on health and hygiene in the 15th century and in a slightly later period. The majority of the said printed matters originate from the collections of Gdansk church libraries, while the presence of items of other origin (private owners) makes it possible to trace the road medical incunabula came to Gdansk to finally find their way to the resources of the Gdansk library.
The author of the article explains the modesty of the Gdansk medical literature resources with the fact that there was not a single university functioning in the city by the River Motlawa in the early modern period. The presence of this kind of incunabula in church libraries and private collections of books indicates that the knowledge they contained was applied for personal use rather than in professional medical practice, although some of the items in question originate from book collections belonging to doctors.