Česká expedice

Česká expedice was a publishing house at the time of the national rebirth of the Czechs and a center for the promotion of Czech-language literature in Bohemia .

The publishing house, with booksellers and second-hand bookstores, was founded in 1790 by the publisher and journalist Václav Matěj Kramérius after the publishing house on St. Wenceslas Square ( Svatováclavské nakladatelství , also Dědictví sv. Václava) was closed and became the literary center of the Czech national movement in the Habsburg monarchy .

Above all, the texts of the so-called reanimators were published, almost exclusively in Czech . This included books and newspapers containing the calendars , religious texts, stories and poems popular at the time . The distribution of the printing was done mostly in rural areas. They were mostly obtained from clergymen, canons and educated citizens who made them available to readers in lending libraries.

After Kramérius's death, his friend and colleague Jan Rulík ran the publishing house for a short time. This then passed to the son, the writer Václav Rodomil Kramérius , who, less successful than his father, sold the publishing house to Johann Ferdinand von Schönfeld (1750-1821). Its family business was the largest publisher in Prague at that time (1787 with 17 presses) with the publication of newspapers and popular works of religious, educational and entertaining literature.