The Library's resources consist of books and magazines which have been purchased or obtained through donations or exchange with museums, libraries, art academies, or art associations, both Polish and foreign (currently around 200), as well as 19th and 20th century prints from library collections, which have been given to the Museum since it was founded, usually with works of art or other artefacts.
The specialist collection consists of encyclopaedias, encyclopaedic dictionaries, general and specialist dictionaries, books on the history of art and material culture, and artists' monographs and albums. The Library's 30,000 volumes of catalogues of exhibitions, collections and auctions include many important and rare publications. Another part of the collection, mainly obtained through bequests, consists of books from other areas e.g. history and historiography, geography and sightseeing, literature and memoir-writing. These works attest to the broad interests of the original owners, who include Feliks Jasieński, the columnist, collector, Japanese art lover, and propagator of modernism; the numismatists Emeryk Hutten-Czapski, Antoni Ryszard, and Marian Gumowski; the anthropologist Edward Goldstein; the building inspector and architecture historian Wincenty Wdowiszewski; historian and columnist August Mosbach; the artists Stanisław Wyspiański, Olga Boznańska and Józef Czapski; the art historians Władysław Janiszewski, Kazimierz Buczkowski, Helena Blum, and Maria Gutkowska-Rychlewska; and Leon Płoszewski the literary historian and publisher of the collected works of Stanisław Wyspiański.
The Library also has more than 18,000 volumes of Polish and foreign magazines. The most interesting collection are the magazines from the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. The most important of these are the academic and popular publications devoted to art and artistic techniques, including the Polish periodicals Architekt, Arkady, Sztuka, and Sztuki Piękne; the German publications Die Christliche Kunst, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, Dekorative Kunst, Die Kunst, and Pantheon; and the French magazines: Les Arts and L’Art et les Artistes.
Artistic phenomena from the beginning of the 20th century are described in numerous literary/artistic magazines e.g. the Polish publications Chimera, Lamus, Maski, Miesięcznik Literacki i Artystyczny, and the Krakow magazine Życie; German language publications such as Der Jugend and Ver Sacrum; English magazines such as The Studio; and Russian publications such as Mir Iskusstva. The collection also includes literary/academic magazines, which in many cases are complete, such as Biblioteka Warszawska, richly illustrated weeklies such as Bluszcz, Ilustracja Polska, Kłosy, Świat, Tygodnik Ilustrowany, and Życie i Sztuka and the satirical publications Diabeł, Liberum Veto and Simplicissimus. Also important is the collection of numismatic magazines (mainly from the collection of Emeryk Hutten‑Czapski). In the 1990s the Library acquired a set of the Parisian magazine Kultura (from the library of Józef and Mikołaj Czapski).
The Library also has more than 150 current magazine titles, most of which are obtained through exchange. These include bulletins, annuals and operational reports published by Polish and foreign museums, academic art journals, and numismatics and military history magazines.
