The catastrophic floods in the Czech lands in July 1997 and August 2002 showed that historical flood memory had been lost. The little used sources to recover it include early printed books. This article brings a selection of several exceptional flood cases captured by printed documents from the 16th-18th centuries. Extant early printed books and the information that they contain (verified from other sources where possible) suitably complement and extend the potential of historical hydrology and meteorology for the study and documentation of early floods that occurred before the beginning of instrumental observations and measurements. and Jan Munzar, Stanislav Ondráček, Lubor Kysučan.
We feature an article on the history and the present of the Oriental Institute’s library. With over 200,000 volumes (including periodicals andmanuscripts), it ranks among the largest libraries within theCzech Academy of Sciences. It is divided into the General Library, Chinese Lu Xun Library, Korean Library, Tibetan Library, and John King Fairbank Library. Its collections include mainly publications on the history, literatures, languages, religions, and cultures of the countries of Asia and Africa. The Chinese Lu Xun library holds a special collection of Chinese books (about 67,000 volumes). The Korean Library presently holds more than 3,500 volumes. Its older part is mostly of North Korean origin. Thanks to generous gifts from the Korea Foundation, its collections were considerably enriched with South Korean publications in 1996 and 1997. and Jan Luffer a Veronika Danešová.