"They kept thinking how I was going to run the studio, but you have to join the party. It was impossible to teach without that then. And now every two years they'd call you in and want to interview you like that. Most of the time there was a bursar who was the chairman of the party, who was sort of a worker communist. A really unpleasant communist. Of course, every time he was addressed as 'comrade'. So he would sit you down and say, 'Comrade, I have nothing but praise for you here, and Eugen likes you very much, but that's a little bit too little to be at the university, and I'd like to know how you acquaint the students with the conclusions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party?' That was the question. So what could one say to that? I always talked about how I was interested in making sure that these students were hard-working, that they were able to do government work, and I was actually zigzaging all the time because how do you have the conclusions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union... But to him it was not enough. 'You know, comrade, what you're saying to me is not bad and I think you mean it sincerely, but still, I'm missing the commitment that you're missing there.' Well, and that's the way the conversations went. Now you've left and you didn't even know how you ended up. In the evening, the teacher calls me and says, 'Rost'a, it's okay, they'll let you stay there.' That´s how it was every two years. Or interviews in between. They wanted you to make a commitment to the October Revolution. Commitment? What commitment? So my boss always said to me, 'Hey, you know what? Let's say we made a New Year's card for Charles University.' I said, 'Will that be enough?' 'We'll take a ride with this Charles University.' We kept going around it. Two other assistants came in with me, and they joined the party, and I started to become a kind of black sheep. I stopped being a prospect for that Communist Party leadership, and one day they told me that if I didn't apply to join the party, I should leave the school."
"The Velvet Revolution. I was excited about that, of course, but there was no one here who wasn't excited. I even made a poster, a kind of Havel. I kind of laughed about it afterwards, because they started making posters of the Velvet Revolution and all these underground people never made any posters because they were afraid, after all. First of all, I printed it in a print shop, I even know where, in a print shop called Panton, which was in Žižkov, and I paid those guys out of my pocket, as I always did, but if it hadn't worked out and if the communists had continued to rule, I could have done ten years for stealing socialist property. That was no fun. They would have been the ones to get their hands on it." - "Is that what you did in the demonstrations after November 17?" - "Yes, within the framework of the 17th of November. We stood on Wenceslas Square, somewhere in front of Melantrich, and I came home in the evening thinking I would do this. Then there was another interesting thing. How was it actually? I printed the posters and I made them in the school workshop, and then Joska Skalník, who I knew well because he was my year, came there and he brought the photo, the Havel to the Castle photo, and I composed the font for him. He got the photo from a photographer called Fikejz, and I made the photo, the font, together with Pavel Hrach in about half an hour. But in the end it's signed by this Skalník, but that's okay."
"Of course, those times were not good. The publishing house stopped publishing good books and started publishing crap. It was simply occupied by Kozak, who wrote books like On the Hunt in Bambujka, Tajga attacks. Again there was this Russian pressure, and that's why I left the publishing house, because there it was that I had to commission five books every month, and when I went to Rathouský, for example - when I told him to do The Hunt in Bambujka, he would say, 'Fuck you!' So I ended up doing it. Just so I wouldn't have to beg for the good ones." - "Was there at least freedom in the graphic and art design of the book?" - "There was. I, as the head of that editorial department, had veto power. Of course, I had an editor over me who was not stupid, unfortunately. I told you that. That was the one Jan Pilar. How we were at Seifert's. He wasn't stupid and he liked me quite a bit. I didn't give him any trouble, I did my tasks relatively well. We used to get prizes at the Most Beautiful Book Awards. He went there to get them, so everything was normal, as it should be. Well, the books were so stupid I didn't want to do it anymore. Eventually, even the good, capable writer, what was his name? He wrote The Childhood of Julius Fučíkk... It was just a tragedy what books were coming out. But nothing happened to me. I was doing the actions that you and I were talking about. So of course, when you're making a house for Šrámková... I never watched the news on TV either. Never! As soon as 7 o'clock came, the TV went off. I worked late, but every newscast started with 'The party and the government have decided today,' that's how everything started. That time... I knew who the first secretary of the Communist Party was, but I didn't know the second and third ones, because I just wasn't interested. So, of course, Šrámková didn't pressure me to make something communist on her ceiling, or Prager didn't tell me to make the font workerish. So that was out of the question. So I got through it, as I would say, relatively fine. Of course it pissed me off, but it pissed everybody off, it pissed off 15 million people here."
Rostislav Vaněk was born on 31 October 1945 in Prague into the family of lawyer Rostislav Vaněk and Marie Vaňková. His uncle Mojmír Vaněk worked as Edvard Beneš’s personal secretary from 1945. He was arrested by State Security (StB) in 1949 and sentenced to 18 years for treason in the trial of Čumper and Co., of which he served 11 years. His mother, Marie, entered the working-class profession to alleviate an unsatisfactory cadre profile with a view to better education for her son Rostislav and daughter Marie. In 1960, he began his studies at the Secondary Industrial School of Graphic Arts in Prague and continued his studies at the University of Applied Arts (UMPRUM) in the Studio of Graphic Arts and Illustration under Professor Karel Svolinský. In 1974 he co-founded the graphic and typographic group Typo etc., which exhibited in 1983 at the ITC Center in New York. During the group’s existence, around 30 exhibitions were held at home and abroad. In 1976-1985 he worked as head of the art editorial department of the publishing house Československý spisovatel. Subsequently, he continued his freelance work and realized the orientation system of the New Stage of the National Theatre and the Prague subway. In 1995, he co-founded the TypoDesignClub, where he held the position of director, and from 2001, he led the Graphic Design and Visual Communication Studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague for 13 years. At the time of filming in 2022, he was heading a similar studio at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art.
