Vladimír Hájek – DV a jeho výroba. Original Album of Czechoslovak Advertising and Workplace Safety Designs, 1957

HÁJEK, Vladimír. DV a jeho výroba [DV and Its Production]. Czechoslovakia, 1957. Original red leather album, 35 × 25.5 cm, with gilt lettering, applied metal monogram, and decorative embossed metal spine strip secured by rivets. 28 plates containing 44 mounted photographs of graphic designs. The album leaves feature printed decorative borders incorporating wheat, flowers, foliage, and five-pointed stars. Very well preserved.

An original presentation album documenting Czechoslovak commercial and institutional graphic design during the early socialist period. The 44 photographs reproduce designs for advertising, restaurant and retail signage, industrial promotions, agricultural mechanization, public information campaigns, and workplace safety notices. Together, they provide an extensive visual overview of the signs, advertisements, and public notices encountered in everyday life in communist Czechoslovakia during the 1950s, from restaurants and shops to factories, agricultural enterprises, and public institutions.

The compositions combine bold modernist typography, geometric arrangements, photomontage, and simplified pictorial symbols. They demonstrate the continued application of interwar modernist graphic principles within the visual culture of socialist Czechoslovakia.

Vladimír Hájek (1926–1994) was a Czech graphic artist who worked at the National Gallery in Prague during the early 1950s, briefly heading its graphic collection in 1954, and subsequently held a position with the Czech Fine Arts Fund. The present album documents his work in commercial advertising, institutional publicity, and public information graphics.

The photographs are individually mounted on decorated album leaves, several with identifying captions. The printed borders combine agricultural imagery with communist symbolism, providing a contrast to the modernist visual language of the advertising designs. The original binding bears the title Kniha cti (Book of Honour).