Rose Garden. Handwritten Prayer Books from the 18th and 19th Centuries. The Collections of Jan Poš.

An extensive publication with 333 colour reproductions, published to mark the occasion of the exhibition held in the Olomouc Archdiocesan Museum, for the first time provides a comprehensive introduction to the phenomenon of handwritten prayer books from the 18^th and 19^th centuries, which are a fascinating but underrated chapter in the history of the bilingual Czech and Moravian rural areas book culture. Original prayer books, then widespread, were being copied, hand transcribed, decorated and illustrated mostly by teachers and other non-professionals, adding new artistic qualities to them. The theoretical part of the publication, complete with illustrations, includes a study by Jan Poš, the original owner of this unique collection of prayer books, concerning the artistic qualities of the manuscripts. Other studies by Pavel Černý, Zdeněk R. Nešpor and Jan Kvapil put these artefacts into a more general cultural and historical context. The text is completed with a tribute essay by Jiří Šalamoun, dedicated to the collector Jan Poš. The book portrays fifty-one selected Czech and German manuscripts, showing in an extensive illustrated supplement, the diversity of the individual artistic approaches. The publication includes German and English summaries.