Municipal Library & the Tower of Books: Banned, Typed, Survived
Why is it significant?
Go through the doors of the Municipal Library on Mariánské náměstí, and in the entrance hall you will find a column built entirely of books, thousands of them, stacked in a tight cylinder rising from the floor.
Key Facts
| Place | Municipal Library & the Tower of Books: Banned, Typed, Survived |
|---|---|
| Address | Mariánské nám. 98/1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08760, 14.41700 |
| Part of Walk | Kafka's Prague: A Literary Walk Through the Writers' City |
| Generated | Generated |
Go through the doors of the Municipal Library on Mariánské náměstí, and in the entrance hall you will find a column built entirely of books, thousands of them, stacked in a tight cylinder rising from the floor. Lean into the opening in its side and look down, then up... mirrors at both ends turn it into a tunnel of books with no bottom and no top.
The installation is called Idiom, by the Czech artist Matěj Krén, and it has stood here since 1998. Children love it, photographers queue for it, and hardly anyone notices that the books are not chosen for their titles. They are simply books, the anonymous raw material of a city that reads. That is the point: a tower of words that goes on forever, like the conversation of a whole culture.
In this city the image means more than it would elsewhere. After the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, the regime drew up lists of forbidden writers, and their books were quietly pulled from the shelves of public libraries, this one included. Hundreds of authors simply vanished from the catalogues: Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký and many others who had signed the wrong petition or left the country.
So literature went underground. Writers typed their manuscripts on thin paper with carbon copies, about ten at a time, and readers retyped them again. It was called samizdat, self-publishing. The novelist Ludvík Vaculík ran an entire typewritten publishing house from his flat, Edice Petlice, the Padlock Edition. Books passed from hand to hand overnight, and being caught with one could cost you your job.
Now look around the square. Opposite stands the Baroque Clam-Gallas Palace, its doorways held up by straining stone giants, and on the corner of the New Town Hall sits a statue of Rabbi Loew, the scholar of the Golem legend. Behind you, a wall runs on and on, seemingly without end. That is the Klementinum, and that is where you are going next: follow its wall round into Karlova street, to the gateway of the old Jesuit college.