Detailed remarks in Jan Kowalik’s Bibliography of polish periodicals edited abroad since october 1939

Abstract

1. Kowalik’s work belongs to these bibliographies which we usually call elementary in this branch of knowledge. This is caused not only by the period to which it refers (1939-1973), but most of all by its teritorial extent (the whole world) and by an extremely detailed method of bibliographical description of 3907 items. All this taken together caused a number of problems and troubles which the author faced when he started his many years work upon his bibliography. Comprehensive bibliographies, and such is J. Kowalik’s work, after the first edition still demanded to be supplemented, corrected and improved. Hence there are some detailed remarks on particular positions put here. Those remarks can be divided into two groups. First of them containing corrections and supplements caused merely by bibliographical contents (repetitions of the same descriptions of periodicals, missing information in an annotation about a predecessor, continuation or an addition in a number of bibliographical items, not extensive use of sources quoted by the author, inaccurate or needless references, wrong alphabetical order etc.). The second group consists of supplements and corrections based solely on J. Kowalik’s own collections and materials without borrowing information from public libraries and literature (issued after 1973), which was not available for him. Undoubtedly a thorough examination of national libriaries (which the author of this bibliography hasn’t done) would have resulted in a considerable supplementary material. This should be done in future. The above made remarks do not contain supplementary titles because they had been placed before in my above-mentioned review.