68 Publishers, also called Sixty-Eight Publishers, Sixtyeight Publishers, or even Nakladatelství 68 ('nakladatelství' is Czech for 'publisher'), was a publishing house formed in Toronto in 1971 by Czech expatriate

Expatriate

An expatriate is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of the person's upbringing...

 Josef Škvorecký

Josef Škvorecký

Josef Škvorecký, CM is a leading contemporary Czech writer and publisher who has spent much of his life in Canada. He and his wife were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country...

 and his wife Zdena Salivarová. The purpose of 68 Publishers was to publish books by exile

Exile

Exile means to be away from one's home , while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return...

d Czech

Czech language

Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...

 and Slovak

Slovak language

Slovak , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages .Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by 5 million people...

 writers whose works were banned in communist Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

. The name '68 Publishers' is in commemoration of the Prague Spring

Prague Spring

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II...

 of 1968.

Škvorecký and Salivarová began by publishing both Czech originals, and English translations, of Škvorecký's books. The first book, Tankový prapor (The Republic of Whores) was published in 1971 and was followed by others such as Prima sezóna (The Swell Season), Zbabělci

Zbabělci

Zbabělci is a Czech novel by Josef Škvorecký. Written in 1948 and 1949 and first published in 1958, it is a story from the very end of the Second World War in Europe. Narrated in the first person by a Czech teenager Danny Smiřický, it takes place from 4 May to 11 May 1945 in his hometown, a...

(The Cowards), Konec nylonového věku (End of the Nylon Age). These were followed by the books of Czech and Slovak authors that were banned in Czechoslovakia, and therefore accessible only to the Czech and Slovak community in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, and elsewhere outside the communist bloc. From here the books traveled secretly to the communist homeland.

Many Czech and Slovak writers had their books published by 68 Publishers in the following two decades. Apart from Škvorecký and Salivarová themselves, they were: Bohumil Hrabal

Bohumil Hrabal

Bohumil Hrabal was a Czech writer, regarded as one of the best writers of the 20th century.- Life and work :...

, Jan Křesadlo

Jan Kresadlo

Jan Křesadlo was the primary pseudonym used by Václav Jaroslav Karel Pinkava , a Czech psychologist who was also a prizewinning novelist and poet....

, Alan Levy

Alan Levy

Alan Levy was an American author.Alan Levy was born in New York City in 1932 and educated at Brown and Columbia universities. In 1952 at Brown, he co-wrote an original Brownbrokers musical titled Anything Can Be Fixed with Gill Bach and Porter Woods...

, and Erazim Kohák

Erazim Kohák

Erazim Kohák is a Czech philosopher and writer. His early education was in Prague. After communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, his family escaped to the United States....

. In 1981, 68 Publishers issued a book by Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert was a Nobel Prize winning Czech writer, poet and journalist.Born in Žižkov, a suburb of Prague in what was then part of Austria-Hungary, his first collection of poems was published in 1921...

 (the only Czech writer to win a Nobel Prize in Literature

Nobel Prize in Literature

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...

), Všecky krásy světa (All the Beauties of the World). Expatriate Czech musician Karel Kryl

Karel Kryl

Karel Kryl was a popular Czech singer-songwriter and performer of many protest songs in which he strongly criticized and identified the shortcomings and inhumanity of the Communist and later post-communist regime in his home country.-Biography:Kryl was born on April 12, 1944, in Kroměříž, in...

 had some albums released by 68 Publishers as well. Prior to 1989, 68 Publishers had published over 220 works of mostly original prose, poetry and memoir literature. Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera , born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in...

's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being , written by Milan Kundera, is a philosophical novel about two men, two women, a dog and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968. Although written in 1982, the novel was not published until two years later, in France...

was first published in Czech through 68 Publishers in 1985, though it had already been published in France in 1984.