Loading…
18
Saw a censored Soviet atlas in a tiny Prague bookshop and the blank spots cracked me up
There was a 1954 Soviet world atlas on the shelf for about $40 and whole cities in the Urals had just been painted over with blue water. The owner said a buyer once asked if those were real lakes and she didn't have the heart to say no. Anyone else run into a book where the censorship is more interesting than the original text?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
sam_wood608d ago
The stamp on the title page tells you a lot, my copy of a 1952 Czech atlas has a little glue mark where some librarian peeled off a sticker, which means it sat in a locked drawer for decades. The blank spots were never meant to fool readers, they were meant to fool border guards who might flip through your bag at a checkpoint. So the book ends up being two stories at once, the maps they printed and the panic they hid.
2