Jiří Tomáš

"We were managing eleven departments with eleven libraries. I was training the librarians and also buying the literature. There was quite a lot of money for it, and the conditions began to loosen up, so some quite interesting titles started coming out. I would buy Hemingway, for example, and also Hašek. I also organized discussions with the projection of Voskovec and Werich's films. We would always invite Jan Mikota, who worked as the press secretary of the Liberated Theatre, and he would bring some V + W film. And strangely enough, the soldiers liked it. It was actually the former PTP, the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. Then they disbanded them and made it a road army, so the guys did their weapons training there for the first six months and then worked on construction sites. And I worked in the book section. There was supposed to be a professional soldier. There were two jobs like that, a book methodologist and an aesthetic education methodologist, and since the professional soldiers didn't have the qualifications to do that, the conscripts did it. And the aesthetic education was carried out by Pavel Polák from Ypsilonka in Liberec."

"In 1990, the expenses were high, eighty to ninety thousand. Then it started to drop, of course. The market got saturated. Then we would also make perhaps only a thousand copies, or eight hundred, what would have been called bibliophilia before. We used to do, for example, Messalina or The Supermale by Apollinaire [editor's note - the author of the publications is Alfred Jarry]. We earned a million in those first three years. But the truth is that we also lost it because of a dishonest distributor. Some engineer named Rabas simply swindled us out of it."