Diversity is strength

The book deals with the history of two most important exile publishing houses of the post-1968 period: Index, based in Cologne, Germany, and Sixty-Eight Publishers, operating in Toronto, Canada. The study focuses on comparing their "parallel biographies": Both publishers were similar in many respects but had their own conceptual preferences, and their authors’ backgrounds differed in most cases but coincided in a few, which led to competitive relations, sometimes astonishingly heated (especially when it came to publishing works by authors living in Czechoslovakia). The author of the study examines the activities of both publishing houses in the context of the literary life of the Czech exile and also takes brief note of other publishing houses, cultural magazines, etc. His sources are based on his many years of research into this topic, as well as on the archive of the Index publishing house deposited at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), the archive of the Toronto-based Six-Eight Publishers deposited at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, and finally the archive of the Josef Škvorecký Society in Prague.

Michal Přibáň (1966) works as a literary historian at the Institute of Czech Literature of the CAS and lectures at the Prague School of Creative Communication. He specialises mainly in samizdat and exile literature, is the co-editor of Josef Škvorecký's Writings and heads the online Dictionary of Post-1945 Czech Literature. He has led the authorial teams of the dictionaries Czech Literary Publishing Houses 1949-1989 and Czech Literary Samizdat 1949-1989, and has contributed to the publication Periodicals in Exile (1999).