Krakow was named a UNESCO City of Literature in 2013, and unlike a lot of civic designations, this one was earned. Two Nobel laureates in literature lived here - Czesław Miłosz (CHESS-wahf MEE-wosh) and Wisława Szymborska (vees-WAH-vah shim-BOR-skah). The Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364, has been producing and arguing about Polish writing for six and a half centuries. Stanisław Lem, the science fiction writer whose ideas got further ahead of the field than almost anyone's, spent most of his life in the city.
What makes Krakow good for readers is not a single sight, though. It is that reading in public is normal here. Cafés do not rush you, bookshops keep chairs, and nobody looks twice at someone spending three hours with a paperback and one coffee.
Massolit, and the other English-language bookshops
Massolit Books & Café on ul. Felicjanek, a few minutes west of the Old Town toward the river, is the anchor of English-language reading life in Krakow. It occupies a warren of connected rooms in an old apartment building - floor-to-ceiling shelves, creaking parquet, secondhand and new stock in English, and a café at the back that does very good cheesecake and brownies.
It is the kind of place you go intending to stay 20 minutes. Sections cover Central European history and Polish literature in translation better than any general bookshop you will find at home, which makes it the right place to buy your Miłosz, your Szymborska, your Lem and your Bruno Schulz before you leave. Prices for secondhand English paperbacks are modest - often somewhere around 20-40 PLN. Check current hours before a special trip; it generally opens through the day and into the evening.
For Polish-language stock and a broader selection, the large chain bookshops in the Old Town and the shopping centres carry translations, and several stock a decent English shelf. Secondhand shops - look for the word antykwariat (an-tik-VAR-yat) - are scattered through the centre and around the university district, and are where you find the older editions, the Lem first printings and the odd English orphan.
Cafés that let you sit and read
Krakow's café culture predates its tourism, and the literary cafés are still functioning cafés rather than museums of themselves.
Nowa Prowincja on ul. Bracka, just off the Main Square, is the classic. Small, dark, plain, famous for hot chocolate thick enough to stand a spoon in, and long associated with Szymborska and the poets around her. It is genuinely tiny, so mid-afternoon on a weekend you will not get a table.
Café Camelot near ul. Św. Tomasza and the cafés along ul. Kanonicza below Wawel are the alternatives when Prowincja is full. In Kazimierz, the cafés around ul. Józefa and Plac Nowy skew younger and busier, but several have back rooms that stay quiet until evening.
A note on the etiquette: ordering one coffee and reading for two hours is entirely acceptable in an independent café here, and unremarkable. In the tourist-facing places directly on the Main Square, it is less so, and you will pay two or three times as much for the privilege of being hurried.
Following Szymborska, Miłosz and Lem around the city
Wisława Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in 1996 and remained, by all accounts, deeply unimpressed by the fuss. The Szymborska Foundation she established runs readings, awards a major poetry prize and holds events around the city; check what is on while you are there rather than expecting a permanent museum. Her poems are the best possible introduction to Polish literature for an English-speaking reader - plain, funny, quietly devastating, and superbly translated.
Czesław Miłosz spent his final years in Krakow after decades of exile in France and the United States. The Miłosz Festival, held in the city, brings international poets in for readings and discussions; it runs on a cycle rather than annually in every form, so check the dates.
Stanisław Lem lived in Krakow for most of his adult life and the city has marked him in various ways over the years, including public art and periodic exhibitions. Start with Solaris if you have not read him, then The Cyberiad for the jokes.
There is one more writer worth knowing for a Krakow trip: Joseph Conrad, born Józef Korzeniowski in what is now Ukraine, spent formative teenage years in Krakow after his family's exile ended. The house associated with that period sits in the Old Town.
Libraries, university buildings and where to actually go inside
The Jagiellonian's historic heart is Collegium Maius on ul. Jagiellońska, and its Gothic arcaded courtyard is free to walk into during opening hours. The interiors - the great hall, the library room, the collection of early scientific instruments including objects associated with Copernicus, who studied here - are seen on a guided tour with a limited number of English slots per day. Book ahead; walk-ups get turned away in summer.
The Jagiellonian Library is a working research library rather than a visitor attraction, holding manuscripts including the De revolutionibus autograph, but access to the special collections is by scholarly arrangement. Do not turn up expecting a tour.
For a general public reading room with a view, the city's larger public libraries and the university's newer buildings are welcoming and quiet, and there are cafés attached.
Festivals, and the month worth timing a trip for
Krakow's literary calendar clusters. The Conrad Festival in autumn is the major international literature event, bringing novelists and essayists from around the world for several days of talks - many sessions run in English or with translation, and tickets are cheap or free. The city also hosts a large book fair in autumn at the exhibition centre, which is overwhelmingly Polish-language but a spectacle regardless.
Poetry events, small-press launches and readings happen year-round in bookshops and cafés, most advertised only on Facebook and only in Polish. Massolit's noticeboard is the most reliable English-language source for anything happening in the city.
Dates move, so if you are planning around a festival, confirm on the official site before booking.
What to read before you come
Four books will change what you see here more than any guidebook.
Szymborska's collected poems, in the Barańczak and Cavanagh translation, for the voice of the city's intellectual life. Miłosz's The Captive Mind, written in exile, for the best account anyone has given of how intelligent people talk themselves into accepting a totalitarian system. Lem's Solaris for the imagination. And for the darker layer of the region, Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles - Schulz was from Drohobycz, not Krakow, but he is inseparable from this literary world and was murdered by the Nazis in 1942.
If you want the history rather than the fiction, Norman Davies writes about Poland in English better than almost anyone, and his work explains why a city this old has so few of its own people left in some of its districts.
One concrete tip: go to Massolit on your first morning, not your last. Buy the book you are going to read on the trip there, then read it in the places it is about - a Szymborska poem in Nowa Prowincja, or Miłosz on a bench in the Planty. It costs nothing extra and it is the single best thing a reader can do with a weekend in this city.
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