In 1926 the Municipal Museum in Bielsko had a library which contained 400 books. In the 1930s the collection of books in the library constantly grew under the watchful eye of the town mayor, Dr Franciszek Przybyła. The museum collections and the library archive were cared for by a full-time curator. They were open to readers on Sundays and during holidays between 10.00 am and midday, and on demand for a set fee. In January and February 1945, owing to military activities, they were broken up and scattered around the area. All the catalogues were lost, which made it impossible to retrieve the books and reassemble the collection afterwards.

However, in the autumn of 1945 it did become possible to create a museum and library of serious historical and academic value, from the collections discovered in abandoned properties formerly owned by Germans. The archives of the Sułkowski dukes were taken over by the State Archives and transferred to Pszczyna. The Voivodeship Centre of Book Collections in Katowice, run by Dr Franciszek Szymiczek, carried out an extremely swift inspection of the remaining Bielsko collections and removed around 2,000 selected items comprising old prints, manuscripts and municipal documents.

The current library resources, numbering approximately 13,000 books, have been divided into three categories: General, Specialist (sixty-four old prints published prior to 1800) and Non-Standard Collections.

One of the most interesting works is Con Dichiarationi… (Sonnets and poems) by Petrarch, published in Venice in 1564, embossed in the printing house of master bookbinder Nicolo Apresso. The book contains six woodcuts and a beautiful printer’s mark.

Another interesting item in the collection is a book published in Wittenberg in 1539. Since there is no title page, we can only surmise that this is Rutschlag von der Kirchen... by Martin Luther. A representative example of the cartographic section is an atlas by J.Ch. Herenberg, published in Nuremberg with hand-coloured copperplate engravings, containing nineteen maps spanning the years 1743 to 1776. One of the fascinating curios is a manuscript, the ‘Wilamowice Inventory’ of the church in Pisarzowice, whose records began in 1636 and were kept until around 1725. It provides much invaluable information, namely the inventory of St. Martin’s Church in Pisarzowice and records of people baptised in that church.

The library is used predominantly by Museum staff in the day-to-day course of their work and by those writing academic dissertations.