The purpose of this paper is to describe the specifics of the private collections of books, such as the Polish community Podolie in the late nineteenth – early twentieth century in the context of librarian ethnology. The basis of the sources of this study is a department of rare and valuable editions of the regional scientific library in Vinica, which houses over 35 thousand books, some of which are books that have been nationalized in the post-revolutionary times by the Polish Assembly.