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 everal 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.