The “Old” Samizdat Is Dead, Long Live the “New” Samizdat! The Liberated Samizdat Club in the PostCommunist Czechoslovak Book Market

In the final issue of the clandestine Lidové noviny from December 1989, Václav Havel bid farewell to the newspaper’s samizdat era in his “Goodbye samizdat” editorial: “Goodbye samizdat Lidové noviny, goodbye conspiracies, goodbye interrogations! Hello printer, hello new readers, hello freedom!” A few months later the press began to report about an extraordinary project by the Liberated Samizdat Club and its promise to literally “return to samizdat” by self-publishing the first editions of previously unpublished books. All the participants were to work for free, and the size of the print run was to be determined by previous subscriptions. This “new” samizdat, as a revolt against the principles of market economics in the era of liberalisation and transformation, is at once a specific chapter in the post-Communist history of the Czechoslovak book market and a contribution to the history of samizdat and its continuities and discontinuities.