School day: afternoon

After lunch, we were treated to a lecture by Dr. Richard Sipek, the Curator of old prints at the National Museum.


Dr. Sipek talked about Baroque bourgeois libraries in the Czech lands in the 16th and 17th centuries. Many private libraries were developed at this time; they were mostly vocational and a large library collection was a social status symbol. Most bourgeois libraries ended up being absorbed into aristocratic libraries, and Dr. Sipek has spent some years searching these libraries to find the private collections (shown in the photo is the collection of a clerk in the 17th century).

Fun fact: books were sold unbound, and once you purchased the pages you would take them to the book binder, where he would insert extra pages into the text for notes.


Our final lecturer was Dr. Ivanka Pribramska, one of our hosts on the trip. She gave us a history of Czech libraries and an overview of the current library system. The country has passed laws in the past century to promote and encourage libraries, and the current system is very vibrant and includes the large national library, 13 regional libraries, and thousands of small school and public libraries.