About us
Meaningful sentences/worlds for your reading apparatus.
This is the text Archetypal started with. Fifteen years on, the direction holds: published translations stay free, the association is run openly (public bylaws, a transparent bank account), and small creative groups work on each book together. How we pay the people who carry it is still being worked out - see Kam míříme (in Czech).
We are a non-profit organization dedicated to translating thoughtful, visionary, psychedelic and challenging stories, essays and books for Czech language speakers around the world. We're committed to promoting clarity of thought and vision.
We're not trying to start and run a business, and we don't seek to turn it into profits. It would be nice if we could, in time, pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and be able to routinely put together money for the authors we publish and a working wage for the people who do all the other work. Today, we just want to make meaningful content available to people who otherwise could not get exposed to it - and we'll see. It's just that today, while everyone is focusing on how to save the old ways, there are rich new possibilities available for those who are willing to reconsider everything around the topic of publishing and translating.
While the current publishing world seems to be debating what to do next, scores of people all around the world are already supplying their social circles with translations of anything they deem interesting and wasn't yet translated, even if it is technically illegal. That's how subtitles for TED talks and for movies or TV series get done - by volunteers, doing it because they feel it needs to get done.
Dealing with serious, yet enlightening content should help us to recuperate costs, because our “readers” are people who know they want meaningful information, not the kind of ballast the mainstream cultures and subcultures tend to offer; and as we're obviously not in it for money (there's not much of a market for meaningful and accessible, and most publishers in this area tend to subsidize their business by other means), it's possible for us to actually make enough to cover the costs.
For example, our marketing takes care of itself as people recognize the consistent worth in what we publish and support us because they want to be part of a solution, to help with a good cause. The effect this could have on our society and environment is worth more than what we could possibly earn trying to make our activities profitable in the archaic ways.
Instead of remonstrating about contemporary „problems", we instead address the lack of true education that lies at their core. Instead of complaining almost nothing ever gets done about it, instead of just shrugging it off as impossible under current conditions, we just do it, we make it real, we show it's possible - just do what truly needs to be done.
20. 7. 2011
Jarek Matýšek
Browse our translations (in Czech).