‘The Songs of the Polish People’ constitutes a monographic collection of Polish folk song and dancess. This volume was prepared at the time when Kolberg worked on the serial publication devoted exclusively to songs and music. Later, he decided to consider it as the first volume of ‘The People’. This book opens a multivolume cycle of Kolberg’s regional and problem monographs. The first part includes texts and melodies of 41 ballads; most of them are given in numerous variants from various Polish regions (totally 444 ballads). In the second part, 466 dance melodies with refrains are collected. Kolberg’s brief introduction contains a discussion of editorial principles employed by him and general comments on folk music. Three introductions by three contemporary editors precede the photo-offset re-edition: in the first, J. Gajek presents information about the proceedings on re-edition of Kolberg’s Complete Works undertaken by the Polish Ethnological Society; in the second, J. Krzyżanowski discusses Kolberg’s contribution to the area of folk literature edition; in the third, M. Sobieski considers Kolberg as composer and musical folklorist. The introductory part also contains a sketch map of the regions of Kolberg’s individual monographs. The main part is enriched by 10 color illustrations of folk costumes by Antoni Kolberg and Karol Marconi.