The Most Beautiful Polish Books 2025

From 16 July to 13 September 2026 the Museum of Modern Art showed the winners of the 66th Polish Association of Book Publishers’ competition: 7 prizes, an Honorary Award and 54 distinctions from 304 entries.

Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej on the exhibition:

The exhibition The Most Beautiful Polish Books 2025 presents publications awarded and honored in the 66th edition of the Polish Association of Book Publishers’ competition, organized since 1957.

A book reveals its full potential when we view it as a whole: a medium of content and image, a material object, a space for reading, and a form of visual culture. Its meaning develops in the relationship between text and page composition, in the rhythm of spreads, the proportions of margins, the choice of typeface, the texture of paper, color, binding, and the way images are presented. Each of these elements contributes to building meaning.

The exhibition The Most Beautiful Polish Books 2025 presents publications awarded and honored in the 66th edition of the Polish Association of Book Publishers’ competition, organized since 1957. From its inception, the competition has emphasized the importance of editorial and graphic design as an essential part of a book. The focus here is on design understood as work on the relationship between idea, text, image, material, and execution.

This year’s edition gathers books with diverse functions, scales, and formal strategies: literary, scientific, artistic, album-style, children’s, popular science, and bibliophile. In some publications, discipline, restraint, and clarity of composition dominate; in others, the courage of experimentation, intensity of image, play with scale, rhythm, or material. In the best realizations, form gains internal justification: it stems from the content, guides the reading, sets its pace, and deepens the reception experience.

In the 66th edition of the competition, 152 publishing houses participated, submitting a total of 304 books. The jury awarded 7 equivalent prizes, an Honorary Award, and 54 distinctions. The scale of this year’s edition confirms the vitality of Polish book culture and the importance of the competition as a place for recognizing the most outstanding editorial, design, and printing achievements.

The exhibition reminds us that the book remains one of the most demanding and capacious media of contemporary culture. It is a place of collaboration for designers, editors, publishers, printers, and bookbinders. In their work, technical precision meets imagination, and seemingly discreet decisions determine the character of the whole.

What to expect

The core of the exhibition is the set of publications awarded and honored in the 66th edition of the Polish Association of Book Publishers’ competition. For this edition 152 publishing houses submitted 304 books in total, and the jury gave out 7 equivalent prizes, an Honorary Award and 54 distinctions. So this was not a show about one movement or one designer, but a yearly cross-section of the best work coming out of Polish publishing.

The selection was deliberately mixed: literary, scientific, artistic and album-style books, along with children’s titles, popular science and bibliophile editions. Some of them relied on discipline, restraint and clear composition; others went for experiment, strong imagery and play with scale, rhythm or material. Visitors interested in design could see both approaches side by side.

The details were the actual subject: the proportions of margins, the rhythm of spreads, the choice of typeface, the texture of paper, color and binding. The show was also a reminder that a book is made by a team of designers, editors, publishers, printers and bookbinders. It ran from 16 July to 13 September 2026.

The exhibition description and the full list of winning titles remain on the Museum of Modern Art website (in Polish).

After the show

The winning books travel on. The Polish Association of Book Publishers says they will compete in Best Book Design from all over the World in Leipzig and be shown at the exhibitions held during the Frankfurt and Leipzig book fairs. A selection of independent publishers’ books from the same edition, “Pięknie niezależne” (Beautifully Independent), is on show until 20 September 2026 at the Bęc bookshop, Mokotowska 65 in central Warsaw (Bęc Zmiana Foundation).

Polish Radio’s children’s channel, Polskie Radio Dzieciom (3 August 2026), noted that every book on display could be picked up, browsed and handled, as the competition’s commissioner Magdalena Frankowska had intended (polskieradio.pl, in Polish). In the same interview Frankowska stressed that the jury judges graphic and design work, not the content of the books.

On now at the Museum of Modern Art:

• Adam Kozicki. Wojna wszystkich ze wszystkimi (The War of All Against All) - paintings about the internet and its characters, until 10 January 2027.
• Warszawa w budowie 18 (Warsaw Under Construction 18) - a festival on where Warsaw gets its food, until 27 September 2026.

Related shows elsewhere in Warsaw:

• Kseruj i rozdawaj! (Copy and Hand Out!) at the Museum of Caricature - the other side of publishing: photocopied zines and independent press from the 1980s and 1990s, until 15 November 2026.
• Plakat polski. Kolekcja - odsłona 2 (Polish Poster, second instalment) at the Poster Museum in Wilanów, part of the National Museum - Polish graphic design from the Young Poland period (around 1900) to today, until 27 September 2026.
• Jestem zwierzęciem politycznym (I Am a Political Animal) at the Museum of Literature - Jerzy Giedroyc, his Literary Institute and the Paris-based émigré monthly Kultura, until 31 October 2026.

Museum profile: Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej.