Mluvící pásmo (Talking Zone)

The bibliophile edition of Mluvící pásmo (Talking Zone) bears exceptional witness to the collaboration between two major figures of Czech interwar culture – the writer Milada Součková (1899–1983) and the painter Zdenek Rykr (1900–1940). The work was created in the dramatic atmosphere of the first months of the Nazi occupation and published as a private edition in late 1939. Shortly afterwards, in January 1940, Rykr tragically took his own life.
Milada Součková’s text captures the anxiety of a period in which established certainties were collapsing. The multilayered poetic composition interweaves personal memory, images of the city and fragments of everyday life with an acute awareness of a historic turning point.
An integral part of the book are Zdenek Rykr’s colour linocuts, among his last works in the field of book illustration. Rather than merely illustrating the text, the images form an equal counterpart to it, reflecting similar themes of the city, solitude and existential anxiety.
After the war and again after 1948, Součková and Rykr were largely excluded from Czech cultural awareness for many years. Original copies of Mluvící pásmo are therefore highly valued today as documents of Czech avant-garde culture on the eve of the war. The copy offered here is an original 1939 edition, no. 65 of 100 numbered copies.