Czech Ex Libris

Signed by Mirko Hanak

For my Christmas present to my husband I made a small album of Czech bookplates. I have in the past bought exlibris and other graphics for our artist son, but a few months ago my husband and I were talking about the possibility of creating an exlibris collection. We have run out of wall space for pictures and prints in our home and so a collection of small prints which can be kept in an album appeals. Many antikvariat shops will have a box or an album on a shelf somewhere in which you can find a few or many exlibris treasures. It is a way of collecting original prints, often signed, by well-known Czech artists for as little as a £ each. I know of no other way to develop such an art collection.

Signed exlibris by Plevka

I picked up a collection of 32 bookplates on a Czech auction website and another on ebay. I emailed a gallery about a collection I missed and met with its lovely art director for a coffee in Prague and came away with nearly one hundred bookplates to add to the collection. Now everywhere I go I am on the look-out for antikvariats and pop in to ask for exlibris. Yesterday my husband and I were in Plzen (where the beer comes from) and spent a happy hour sifting through two shoeboxes.

Exlibris by Michael Florian

I have included three of my favourites in this post, but I promise to post with more in future. Watch this space as our collection grows

Chanterelles

As you will have gathered from my earlier posts I have caught the Czech mushroom collecting bug. Although you can find early boletus in the woods, my favourite at this time of year is the egg yellow chanterelle. You will find chanterelles in small troops nestled into moss on banks of dappled shade. They are good mushrooms for a beginner as they are easy to identify with their yellow cap fluted down into a yellow stem. Instead of the usual mushroom gills chanterelles have forked ridges which continue from the cap down the stem. Like all mushroom collectors of my acquaintance I have several mushroom identification books (my favourite by the way is the River Cottage Handbook No 1) and these talk about chanterelles having a scent of apricots. Well they do but only in the way that you get those white paints with a hint of apricot. Chanterelles smell of mushrooms with a hint of apricot, which you can miss if you haven't enough of them.

Today I returned home with enough of these yellow treasures to make a dinner of them for my husband and me. They have such a wonderful flavour and texture that they do not need fancy recipes, just fry them and then serve with scrambled eggs and a slice of bread (Czech rye bread if you can get it) and you will be in ecstasy. My husband was quite smitten with them.

PS Chanterelles were not the only thing harvested in the forest today, there were wild raspberries and strawberries too. However those small atom bombs of flavour somehow didn't make it to the basket. Don't tell my old man.

And Gathering

In my last post I talked about the Czechs as a nation of hunters and in previous posts I have talked about the Czech obsession with gathering mushrooms. In both cases they are very unlike us Brits. For the Czechs hunting is something done by all classes, unlike the British class-ridden approach. Whilst for mushrooming the contrast is even starker - going mushrooming in the Czech Republic is something that starts young, in Britain it doesn't start at all, unless you are unusual. A Czech child will take their little basket and go with their mum or granny into the forest and learn what to pick and what not. My mother, like most Brits, regarded all mushrooms with suspicion unless they were field mushrooms and I was told very clearly never to pick any fungi - they were dangerous. Now unusually I do collect mushrooms. Thanks to the instruction of my Czech friend I now recognise, collect and most importantly eat over 20 types of fungus.

A year ago I had an experience which sums up the differences perfectly. I was in the Forest of Dean collecting mushrooms - being late in the year I was on the look out for the purple Wood Blewits. I was rummaging about in the undergrowth beside a track, when a group passed by close enough for me to hear their conversation. "What is she doing?" "Looking for something, I think." and so on. I carried on and collected a reasonable trawl of purple treasures (blewits are one of my favourite mushrooms).

After a while the group came back, and again the speculation started as to what I was doing - something that would never happen in the Czech Republic as everyone would know what I was up to. For one woman in the group curiousity got the better of her and she broke away from the group and joined me. "What are you looking for?" she asked.

"Mushrooms" I replied, "Would you like to see them." I opened the bag and she looked in. She looked back at me askance. "It's all right," I assured her "They are quite edible."

"Well I hope you know what you are doing, otherwise you won't be around to do it again." She said. I assured her that I did. And she returned to her group and went her way.

When I tell this story to my Czech friends they are amazed that the British should ever be surprised at someone mushrooming, and even more so by the fear of mushrooms that she betrays. Then I tell them about her group - it was made up of a man riding a camel, and three people leading llamas. Of course to a Brit such eccentricity is taken without batting an eyelid, indeed she and her fellows regarded me as the weird one. To my Czech audience this stretches the credulity to breaking point - those Brits are weird.