The BWN Reading Room and our closed stacks hold a total of over 230,000 volumes of books in the fields of English, Germanic, Romance, Iberian, Italian, and Finno-Ugric philologies. The books are mainly purchases and donations. You can search for them in the University of Warsaw Libraries Catalogue. We recommend narrowing your search results to Form and type: Książki (Books), and Location: BWN – Inst. Anglistyki (Insitute of English Studies), etc. In addition, information about some of the collections can be found in our card catalogue (more information here).
The BWN book collection consists mainly of publications in the following languages:
- Dutch,
- English,
- Estonian,
- Finnish,
- French,
- German,
- Hungarian,
- Italian,
- Portuguese,
- Spanish.
Polish-language books also constitute a significant part of the book collection. Furthermore, we possess smaller collections of publications in lesser-used languages, such as Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Welsh, Occitan, Basque, and Nahuatl, the Sami languages, Udmurt, and others.
We collect books on the above languages, as well as on the history and culture of the countries and regions where these languages are spoken.
The BWN book collection includes primarily academic and popular science literature, fiction and non-fiction (in the original and in translation), comics, language learning textbooks, dictionaries, lexicons and encyclopaedias.
The collection features publications in the fields of:
- anthropology,
- art history,
- cultural studies,
- film studies,
- geography,
- history and auxiliary sciences of history,
- linguistics,
- literary studies,
- media studies,
- music and dance,
- philosophy,
- political science,
- psychology,
- sociology,
- theatre studies,
- tourism,
- translation studies,
- visual arts.