1938 Octavo (8°), 20.5×13.8 cm. 103 numbered pages, in Czech. Graphic design, cover and illustrations (13 woodcuts) by Václav Boštík. Title page printed in black and red. 4 black-and-white photographic plates. Loose gatherings in the original wrapper. Published by the author at his own expense in Prague in 1938. The paper is lightly spotted in places and poorly cut open; several creased corners; the wrapper has a worn spine and slightly frayed edges. Provenance: Galerie Moderna. Václav Boštík, then twenty-five years old, accompanied his uncle's book with his early, still figurative original woodcuts. This is a rare example of his work as an illustrator before he made the full transition to lyrical abstraction. The publication also contains 4 photographic plates. Both the author F. Boštík and the painter's father, Václav Boštík Sr., practised photography. František Xaver Boštík – Czech Catholic priest, catechist, poet, writer, teacher, painter and photographer. As a writer he devoted himself chiefly to nature lyric poetry and to the Chotěboř region. After 1948 he was politically persecuted and imprisoned. Uncle of the painter Václav Boštík. In the mid-1960s Boštík turned to almost monochrome paintings, with which he sought to depict a cosmogonic process, fields of energy preceding geometric order. Light comes to the fore, as the primary experience of the world and a universal principle. In the period when he created the Mlhoviny (Nebulae) series, Boštík attempted to clarify and understand the basic elements of visual art, their functions and mutual relationships in the broadest possible sense, and therefore sought to strip painting of everything unimportant and simplify it to the maximum. "If I had to characterise my effort briefly, I would say that I am searching for a lost paradise. I try to find a way out of the labyrinth in which we live, and to come close enough to paradise to glimpse at least something of it." (Václav Boštík, http://www.artlist.cz/vaclav-bostik-1186/, accessed 28 August 2017) Václav Boštík studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague under Prof. Willi Nowak, and technical drawing and descriptive geometry at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He was a member of the Umělecká beseda and later a founding member of the UB12 group. In the second half of the 1950s, together with Jiří John, he created the Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust on the wall of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague.