The Most Beautiful Polish Books 2025

The show gathers books awarded and honored in the 66th edition of the Polish Association of Book Publishers’ competition, which has run since 1957. It is about book design rather than book content: typography, paper, binding and the layout of the page. What you see is the publishing and printing work a jury judged the best in the country.

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 is 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 is deliberately mixed: literary, scientific, artistic and album-style books, along with children’s titles, popular science and bibliophile editions. Some of them rely on discipline, restraint and clear composition; others go for experiment, strong imagery and play with scale, rhythm or material. If design is what brings you here, you get to see both approaches side by side.

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

Tickets, opening hours, and current details are on the Museum of Modern Art website.

Museum profile: Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej.