October 13, 2009

Not-so-forgotten illustrator Josef Lada

This post now resides on my other site 50 Watts:

9 comments:

  1. Great stuff. The very crude trans. of the front cover - "naughty skaeki" {via

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  2. Actually I found it: "Naughty Stories" [Czech] [trans]

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  3. The book was published originally in 1946, I assume the work will be from that time.

    But it is very hard to tell - one of the specifics of Josef Lada is that if you observe his work it does not change much during the years. A great works from 30s are:
    Ezopské bajky (1931) /The fables of Aesop/ with great illustrations of animals and 4 books about Kocour Mikes (Mikes the Tomcat) about wandering cat, that can speak and walks in boots around the world :)

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  4. Thank you both for your help! I updated the post using this info.

    Will

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  5. Lada´s books are the big part of my childhood. Thanks for posting it. The cover of Nezbedné pohádky with the title written in cyrillic is realy funny.
    Nezbedné pohádky were really first published in 1946.

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  6. I love the guy sleeping on top of the stove in the second picture - you often read in Czech or Russian literature about people sleeping on the stove, and never quite understand what it means... I used to know someone who slept on top of his plan chest, but that's a different thing.

    I'm not sure if it's my internet connection or the high quality of your illustrations, Will, but I've been finding it difficult lately to get your posts to download onto the screen. So sorry for not being as communicative as I should.

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  7. ...reminds me of some illustrations of Walter Trier for Erich Kästner's books.

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  8. Josef, what were your favorite books by Lada?

    Ratu, I will definitely check out the Trier/Kastner work, thank you.

    Neil, I'm sure I will now notice people sleeping on stoves in all my books.

    I'm about to adjust the blog in a way that should help the pages load faster. The problem has a lot to do with the way I display images from my flickr account. (Fingers crossed that I don't somehow destroy the blog in the process!)

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  9. are you read the adventures of soldier svejk?
    the pictures of this magnificient boock of jaroslav jasek are mades for lada too.

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