the first picture book for children, the Orbis Sensualium Pictus of Comenius, published
in 1658. Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius) was born in Bohemia, now part of the Czech
Republic. He believed in the importance of pictures in children’s books and Orbis
Sensualium Pictus was a small pictorial encyclopedia with each object pictured and
described in words in both Latin and the vernacular. Mikoláš Aleš, working in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is regarded as the founder of modern Czech
children’s book illustration, while the work of Jivři Trnka in the twentieth century enjoys
a well deserved international reputation. In 1992, Květa Pacovská won the Hans
Christian Andersen Award for illustration, praised for the dynamic quality of her books
and the fact that she turns her children’s books into rare works of art.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Karol Jaromír Erben began to collect Czech traditional
tales systematically, while Bozěna Nĕmcová recorded these stories as he had heard them
in childhood. In the late nineteenth century Alois Jirásek wrote stories and novels about
legendary and historical figures, many of which became popular with young people.
Broučci by Jan Karafiát, published in the early 1870s, became a classic. Two
outstanding Czech writers for children emerged in the interwar period, Josef Lada and
Josef Čapek. Lada’s first book, Moje Abeceda [My ABC] (1911), was followed by
illustrated books of nursery rhymes and proverbs but in 1934 he published O Mikešori
[Mikeš the Cat], in which he combined ancient fable with modern fairy tale and added a
humorous dimension through his comic illustrations, which are deceptively simple in
appearance. Lada does not simplify essentials, but strips his pictures of irrelevant
detail. Josef Čapek showed his interest in children in his early art ventures but not until
he was thirty did he write specially for children. In 1918 he contributed a story called ‘My
fat grandfather and the brigands’ to a collection, A Basketful of Fairy Tales, edited by his
brother, Karel. The tale moves at a brisk pace with a profusion of comic situations and
songs to vary the prose. After 1923, when his daughter was born, children began to play
a more important part in his work. His Tales of the Dog and the Cat (1929), which grew
out of a series of animal cartoons published in a newspaper, soon became his most
famous children’s book.
During the Second World War, many beautiful editions of traditional tales were
published: these were popular because they helped to preserve the national and ethnic
elements of Czech culture. After 1949, when Albatros, the state publishing house, was
established, modern fairy tales and traditional tales from other countries continued to
appear in significant quantities. Although realistic stories were published, notably those
of Marie Majerová, Jaroslav Foglar’s Výprava na Yucatan [The Expedition to the Yucatan]
(1990) was the kind of the book that could only be published after 1989. The author,
through excerpts from the diary of a Boy Scout, gives a picture of young people and
their experiences in Czechoslovakia from 1926 to 1973.
In nineteenth-century Slovakia, moral tales, fiction, poetry and fairy tales were all
published for children in a country seeking for a national identity. After its inclusion in
the new and independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, Slovakia developed a tradition of
illustrated books. Slovak folk-tales were a source of inspiration for many artists such as
Ludovít Fulla and Martin Benka and both of them continued to illustrate children’s
books after the Second World War.
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