A short time ago we recommended to our readers a historicizing publication, 110 Years Under the Walls of Vyšehrad, which was published on the occasion of the 110th anniversary of the Institute for Mother and Child Care. The book, which brings to life the pride of Czech health care, was published by a new Prague publishing house with a remarkable title that encodes the direction the publishing house has taken. This volume from the field of non-fiction was prepared for printing, as the sixth publishing venture in the series, by the editor and director of the rebuilt publishing house in one person, Mgr. František Mareš, whom we have asked for an interview.
First of all, we are interested in a fundamental issue, which stems from the fact that there are currently about two thousand publishing houses in the Czech Republic. Isn't this a strong competition?
"Two thousand publishers is obviously a large number, but the question must be asked: "Which ones?" And if we look at their production from the reader's point of view, i.e. what appears on the bookstore shelves, the number of "good ones" is not so great. The specificity of literature, I should note literature, is defined "... as the use of articulated language as material for a work of art and the sum of these works."/Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, E. Souriau / We could further speak of literature as an art that uses language as a material, of the temporality of this art of its combining the art of sound and the art of meaning...
Although all this is a confirmed truth, I think that literature as the content of a book title should, after reading it, not only contain all the attributes that Aristotle and even Jakobson ascribed to language, but above all, it should communicate something to the reader through it.
And this prerogative of communication, in prose, poetry, drama and film, which is given to man by his talent, cannot be replaced. It just is, one is born with it, and if there were I don't know how many commissions and ministries and boards and courses, then few of the writing set can call themselves writers anyway. Society, whipped by advertising slogans, imposes, after the crunch of a chocolate bar, that the eater should say this and that in his own words, that he should be himself, that he should drink a can of something and have wings, that - in accepting these current advertising "dogmas" - he should be what he wants to be. He was simply because he wants to be, and his words, however foolish, are given the stamp of truth by the act of consumption And so we get writers, poets, playwrights, and there are many of them, and they write many, and there are many books, and we get the confirmation of the saying, "There was a monk, and he read many books, and he did not know what was in them." For today's one, we would replace the verb didn't know with the verb didn't find. To sum up, quantity does not mean quality..."
In the name of your publishing house is coded a guide on how to cope with the mentioned overpressure...
"On a strange power play, we are surrounded by quantity. A lot of everything. What we can eat, what we can wear, what we can ride, what we can sleep on and in... and this attainable multiplicity of everything, like invasive plants, destroys and displaces the singular. Uniqueness has become an endemic hiding in the gullies of reality, and because the gullies are not usually frequented much, it is replaced by all sorts of falsities.
From half-truths to lies.
But on the horror scale, the most horrific is the half-truth. It's truth and lies all rolled into one. It leaves that much-needed way to hide, to escape, to not be and to be. It is a space of chameleonism of character and spirit.
We live on a playground of half-truths and even without their presence we are often clueless.
We've carved out paths that we run down talking about all sorts of things, lowering our voices so no one can hear us because - what if !?
And so we pass judgement, privately, publicly, and we hold a changing yardstick as needed. Not the millionth of the meridian, but ours. A yardstick born and tested by human experience that history is always written by the winners.
And this yardstick recalls the adage that a stick dipped in water appears to be broken.
But she's not broken...
These are the fragments that led us to the name of the publishing house, because what I think is missing at the moment is measurability. The measurability of truth, if there is such a thing, the measurability of lies, the measurability of the catastrophes of political actions and decisions, but above all the measurability of ourselves in the roundabout of our days. And our own measurability is represented by ourselves with the unfailing truthfulness of a stick dipped in water. It is not broken or fractured, it is simply straight.
The question remains what we are and what we remain, immersed in whatever...
We have chosen three important figures of human art: the Discobolus of Miró, the Myslithe of Rodin, the David of Michelangelo.
They have been present in human history for centuries. Their triangle is the "divine eye of human generations" with unchanging vertices that we are moving towards in the real world: To push the boundaries of the possible, to understand the world around us and not to be afraid ...
And the world around all of us is above all real, not a world that one enters and exits by pressing a button on the TV, turning on a computer, using a mobile phone; it is a world in which one is looking for a "substitute for oneself" in work, in thinking, in life, almost as if one would like to replace oneself. He anthropomorphizes things, ennobles them, and forgets to ennoble himself and his relations to the world around him. We want our books to be the antithesis of the globalization practices that are projected into and shape our lives. We want them to bring stories that document the times and the fates of the people in them. Not to conform to yuppie isms, not to gloss over one or the other in the interest of survival and envy."
In a short time your publishing house has already published several books...
"We're a publishing house that has set the goal I've been talking about. It has entered among the publishing giants, established publishing houses, intertwined distribution services and, above all, the strange trampoline of book market connoisseurs with three-letter and other titles, which fabulates about what, predicts what, often with mistakes in spoken and written Czech, exhorts, guides, predicts... it is like a drunkard under a mountain, who advises how to climb the mountain, but cannot stand on his own feet. The books we have published do not form a complete series yet: the Tales of the Kazakh Steppe, Black Angels, The Big Boss, You Are Someone Else, the reissue of Bican-5000 Goals, 110 Years Under the Walls of Vyšehrad, it is an imaginary "literary fan" where each title has its own meaning for us and, I believe, for the reader.
Unfortunately, as it happens, our fledgling publishing house went through a staffing crisis that affected the fate of our, dare I say, best book. The novel You Are Someone Else. It was our staff's fault that it didn't reach readers. We have overcome the crisis, and we are preparing a reissue, but... the time for which it was intended and in which it was expected by readers cannot be undone."
Books instead of cannons
You have now expanded your publishing activities to include printing of university textbooks for Ukrainian universities. This is an admirable activity at a time when our government is supporting the war in Ukraine, sending grenades and money without admitting that it is only prolonging the fighting unnecessarily. It is not weapons to kill, but books and education that young Ukrainians in particular need. "There is no doubt about it. That's why we have started to cooperate with the management of the Ivano-Frankivsk Oil and Gas University, and other universities from Odessa and Kiev are applying for cooperation. The first textbook is in print, the next one is in preparation for print PDF. The textbooks were sponsored by the Pardubice-based construction holding ENTERIA and its presentation is included in both publications. Enteria's management was the first and only one to understand that the resulting series of university textbooks transcends the present and heralds the future - a better one for Ukraine and the world.
Because for ages, behind education there are people, behind people there are businesses and institutions, and behind people there is the approaching time of real and peaceful restoration of Ukraine. Giving arms, even with a prayer of peace, always costs hundreds of thousands of lives. The time is coming, for the umpteenth time in our existence as human beings, to understand human beings, in their uniqueness and difference, and why human beings are close. And so that this process does not have to be repeated again and again every time decades later, education has an irreplaceable place in this. The future reconstruction of Ukraine will change the rhetoric of war and peace. And much that was grandly said some time ago will turn into mindless political blather under this time of truthfulness. Ukrainian textbooks, published by us, will be one of our editorial series. And their support by Czech enterprises, institutions and factories will be evaluated in the implementation of concrete reconstruction contracts. Because he who gives selflessly and first, gives twice."
Conclusion: the written word is what endures...
Globalisation has had its effect on the book market, as it has on everything else. Comenius: "Not to love books is not to love wisdom. Not to love wisdom is to become a fool." It has, it has, and it will. And the stupidity of the marketers of profit and the reign of the viewership of anything, has created the fences of herding of life, thought and values... and the book, for a time, has been incorporated on the ladder of common consumption to the point of uselessness.
But it is an undeniable fact that the return of its necessity, the real necessity of life, is in the hands of writers.
And the publisher is the one who helps to give the book, this man-made miracle, away. That's why we want the books we publish to tell stories that document the times and the fates of the people in them, not to conform to yuppie isms, not to gloss over one or the other in the interest of survival and envy. We want forgetting to be a forgivable process of old age and not a program that distorts historical time. So that the truth of the people living in it is not distorted and clarified by the illiterate who, through the media in which they work, promote themselves above all. We want our time not to be the time of the small, the clumsy, the cowardly and the stupid.
Curriculum vitae - Mgr. František Mareš
Mgr. František Mareš, born in 1943, graduated from the Lepař Gymnasium in Jičín, the University of East Bohemia, lives and works in Prague. He worked at the Czechoslovak Radio as an editor, dramaturge, author of poetry, author of several dozen radio plays, translator, critic. In 1979 he published a translation of a poem by the Bulgarian poet Stefan Canev in World Literature: Kozloduj=m.c2, which was staged at the Viola in Prague. At the beginning of the millennium, he founded and directed Victoria Publishing, and later he was at the birth of an extraordinary encyclopedic project by director Petr Kršák, The History of Self-Consciousness - Diplomats without Passports. He returned to publishing in the middle of this decade during his collaboration with the legendary Olympia publishing house. He is currently the director and one of the managing directors of the publishing house Education and Sport to Self-Consciousness. A book of Mares' memoirs, Life and its Days, will be published next year.
Ivan Cerny
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