The article is centred around the notion of a literary fetish, understood as fascination
with a literary text accompanied by (over) sensitivity to its material form (type
of cover, paper, illustrations, etc.). A theoretical-literary basis for the phenomenon in
question is a conception of a simultaneous functioning of a literary text at the level of
the process and device, described in works of a French sociologist Robert Escarpit. A
character of a book-thing and book-text enthusiast presented in the article serves an
attempt to capture its latest incarnation developing under the circumstances of a rapid
growth of the Polish book market which after a breakthrough in 1989 underwent a
complete transformation. A starting point for a characteristic of a reader-fetishist is
the literature itself, many a times formulating and exploiting the thread of love to
books as an irrational passion. In order to capture the current position of a model
of a reader in question in the space of a literary awareness, the author conducted a
questionnaire among the first year Polish philology students, containing questions
on their reading likes and preferences. On the basis of the questionnaire results and
author’s own experiences one can draw a conclusion that the literary fetishism is not
just the issue of the literature, but also a form of its admiration existing in the reality
