About Julia Woodward
I am a rare-book and manuscript dealer based near Szczecin, Poland. I specialise in incunabula, manuscripts, early printed books and Polonica.
What interests me most is discovery. A book or manuscript can pass through the market for generations with an important part of its story unnoticed: an unidentified hand, an overlooked former owner, a letter addressed to the wrong person, a fragment hidden inside a binding, or a Polish connection that disappears when an object is catalogued elsewhere in the world. Much of my work begins with asking what has been missed.
Before establishing Julia Woodward Antykwariat in Poland, I spent six years as a Director of WoodPaz Books Ltd in England. WoodPaz developed into an international rare-book business handling material across the history of the book, from medieval manuscripts and incunabula to major works of Renaissance printing and modern first editions.
Among the books I have handled are a complete illuminated Paris Bible of about 1250; the Rusch-Mentelin Biblia Latina, one of the earliest obtainable printed Bibles; the 1481 Florentine Divine Comedy, the first illustrated edition of Dante; and Aldus Manutius' 1513 Plato, the editio princeps of Plato's works in Greek. That experience taught me that the most interesting objects are not always those with the most famous names. Often their real importance only emerges through provenance research, bibliography and historical context.
Why Poland?
Returning to Poland led me to establish a business with a more particular purpose.
Polish history survives far beyond Poland's present borders. Books, manuscripts and archives connected with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Partitions, the uprisings and the Great Emigration are scattered through libraries, private collections and the international book trade. Many appear on the market without their Polish significance being fully recognised.
I want to help find those objects again.
My aim is therefore twofold: to handle exceptional books and manuscripts on their own merits, and to look particularly closely for material through which Polish history can be recovered, reconsidered or returned to Poland. I am especially interested in working with collectors, libraries, museums, scholars and conservators where an object has genuine institutional or research significance. This focus on incunabula, manuscripts, early printed books and Polonica, and on bringing significant material back to Poland where possible, is also how I have publicly defined the new Antykwariat.
I believe in doing more than identifying an object and assigning it a price.
The catalogue descriptions here are intended to record what can actually be established about a book or manuscript: who made it, who owned it, where it travelled, how unusual it is, what survives elsewhere, and why it matters. Where an attribution is uncertain, I want that uncertainty to be visible. Where new evidence supports a more important conclusion, I want to pursue it.
Sometimes that process changes an object's significance completely.
This approach grew naturally out of my work in the United Kingdom, where research has ranged from medieval manuscripts and early printing to bindings, provenance and bibliographical questions. The business has also published original research and collecting studies alongside its stock, rather than treating scholarship and dealing as separate activities.
One particularly meaningful experience was helping return a late fifteenth-century copy of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae to the Dominican community of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, from whose historic library it had originated during the time Leonardo da Vinci was there painting The Last Supper. It reinforced something I believe strongly: sometimes the most appropriate destination for an important object is not simply the highest bidder, but the place in which its history becomes whole again.