The volume constitutes a collection of 12,963 Polish proverbs and proverbial expressions gathered in the years 1852-1890 by Kolberg and over a dozen other collectors. Most of the material (8,287 proverbs) was collected, in coordination with Kolberg, by J. Konopka, a publisher of ‘Pieśni ludu Krakowskiego [Songs of the People of the Cracow Region], who was Kolberg’s close friend and hosted him at his estate for over a dozen years. Konopka did not manage to publish his collection that later was incorporated into Kolberg’s materials. The author of ‘Lud’ [The People] recorded 2,600 proverbs; the rest of them come from other collectors - from W. Leśniewski, W. Siarkowski, A. Jakubowski, L. Siemieński, I. Kopernicki, W. Prawdzie, H. Ciesielski, and others. The material was partly collected during field research and partly constitutes excerpts from various Polish works of literature (Old Polish and periodical literature). All of the proverbs were arranged according to a modern dictionary-entry system (based on main words), adapted to the nature of the source, though. They were provided with cross references to S. Adalberg’s ‘Księga przysłów’ [A book of proverbs] published in the years 1889-1894, and to Kolberg's own volumes. An index of auxiliary entries and a glossary of Old Polish dialect words included at the end of the work facilitate the usage of the material. The second edition of ‘Proverbs’, with a new typography, was published in 1977. It contains the same source material, extended, however, through a comparison with ‘Nowa Księga Przysłów Polskich’ [A New Book of Polish Proverbs] published in the years 1969-1972, and a system of references associated with it. The comparison proved that vol. 60 constitutes a contribution to Polish paremiology with about 1,000 new proverbs, until now never recorded, and with several hundred variants.