Odeon Publishing: The Island of Freedom

Normalization period is a unique time in Czechoslovak history that is almost everywhere presented as a time when the socialist regime used its position of power to take back all production and culture including publishing houses. Odeon was a well-known entity at that time and looking back at the editorial and publishing plan from the said period it sometimes seems as if Odeon was partially untouched by the repressions. It is important to concentrate on everyday life in the publishing house while trying to find out how Odeon and its editorial team managed to publish so many books that almost nobody expected to see in a Czechoslovak bookshop. The topic of state censorship, as well as a very specific topic of “covering” the banned authors, will be the central focal point of this article.