"[Supraphon editor Dostál] listened for a while on the phone and then said, 'The StB has installed a listening device here, so give me your phone number and I'll call you from a booth in town.' Then I asked what happened and he said, 'Oh, Ivan Medek signed Charter 77 and they fired him immediately.' I was fond of Mr Medek and asked about him, and Mr Dostál told me that he washed dishes but got sacked and then worked as a hospital helper. One day, I came there and Mr Dostál told me that Medek had progressed and was working as a cloakroom attendant in a restaurant. The editor-in-chief wrote a letter, signed by the entire editorial board of Textbook Editions - that was the name of the editorial board - praising Medek as an excellent person and professional, not a word about politics. Do you know what happened? After a year they fired the whole editorial team, and when I preparing the second volume of the School of Clarinet Playing, it was already another editor working on it."
"It was a lot of work at the farm; we did all of it. We had to mow by hand with a scythe; my dad worked from morning till night. I remember the honesty of both my parents putting potatoes in sacks. I was standing by the weighing scales as a kid watching the needle till it was fifty kilos. My dad added two or three handfuls of potatoes and said: 'People's scales may be set up differently and they could think we cheated them.' I have remembered that moment all my life; honesty should pay off, but it didn't in those days. See, we surrendered our milk. The quotas were high and we never diluted it - it was always full-fat. It didn't make any difference because when the cooperative was about to form, they raised the quota. Once, we still managed, but when they raised it again... It was impossible to get any redress. My father went to the national committee and they told him they didn't do it - the district committee did it. He went to the district to Trhové Sviny and they said that they didn't do it, that the national committee did it. That's how they manipulated us, and when they required three times the amount from us, we couldn't keep up, it was no longer possible."
"Mr Dostál was filling in some papers when they were about to sign the contract with me, and there was a mention about my activity that was monitored by the communists. I wasn't doing well in that respect, I even had to move from Volyně to Strakonice because after 1970, after the background checks, my score was bad. Well, Mr Dostál said, 'You don't have problems.' I said, 'Yes, I do.' Still, he wrote in the box that I didn't have political problems, and it worked. See, if my issues were mentioned the book wouldn't get published. This was confirmed to me when it [the School of Clarinet Playing] came out. The girls at the bookstore in Strakonice where I went to buy textbooks put it in the shop window. There was an uproar at the party's district committee in Strakonice about how it was possible that the School had been published at all."
Bedřich Zákostelecký was born in České Budějovice on 23 March 1942. He spent his youth in Suché Vrbné on a farm which was forcibly collectivised after 1948. He studied the accordion and clarinet at the Military Music School in Liberec in 1956-1959. Having graduated, he was assigned to the Regimental Military Band in Český Krumlov. His interest in teaching music led him to study at the State Conservatory in Pilsen where he graduated in clarinet with professor František Vacovský in 1969. Due to a lack of literature for beginning clarinetists, he compiled the textbooks School of Clarinet Playing I and II. He holds three patents for teaching aids and fingering charts. In the 1970s and 1980s he studied handmade bookbinding with Ladislav Hodný in Týn nad Vltavou, Jiří Faltus in Žamberk, Jindřich Svoboda in Brno and Ján Vrtílek in Žilina. From 1993 on, he worked at the Department of Visual Culture at the University of West Bohemia (ZČU) in Plzeň as the head of the bookbinding studio. His works have been chosen as gifts for celebrities such as Václav Havel, Václav Klaus and Pope Benedict XVI. In 2001 he moved to Přeštice and opened a private Studio of Bookbinding. He moved his bookbinding workshop to a permanent exhibition at Strakonice Castle in 2023.
