My Father and His Book Collection

Abstract

Andrzej Nowicki’s book collection with more than four thousand books, seen through the eyes of his daughter, is a peculiar “pretext” to demonstrate how important the “world” of books, and even broader, the world of “written words” was to him. And how it was manifested in his hundreds of pages read every day and his growing library. His bibliotheca tells a great deal about his philosophical passion, research interests, as well as intellectual, cultural and educational needs. It reflects also his scholarly and philosophical biography and indicates the important areas of his creativity: the history of philosophy including Renaissance, Italian philosophy and the philosophy of culture, Freemasonry, Chinese culture as well as atheism and the study of religion. Moreover, it also reflects his poetic biography. My father’s book collection demonstrates his solid historical approach to the research through collecting a broad range of literature and sources which sometimes seem to be very far from the subject of his research, as well as through his carefulness in documenting (including a rich  iconographic collection), comprising the documentation of his creativity and biography. This collection of books is exceptional not only because of the thematic areas mentioned above, but also due to a rich collection of his Masters and his students’ books. Its uniqueness is also due to the fact that it belongs to another era which ends with the advent of the Internet.