The lost art of the bedtime poster — five plates from a 1930s Czech school

In Prague, in the early 1930s, a small group of illustrators around the publisher Vladimír Žikeš began producing what they called uspávací plakáty — “bedtime posters.” These were single-sheet, mid-sized, full-color lithographs intended to be pinned above a child’s bed. Each poster contained a small scene — a sleeping village, a moon over a forest, a courtyard with a single window lit — combined with a short verse, typically 4–8 lines, in Czech.

The genre lasted about thirty years. It survived the war (in modified form), the early Communist period (with new political imagery grafted on), and the Prague Spring. It did not survive the 1970s normalization, when state publishing centralized and bedtime posters were deemed redundant in the era of mass-produced children’s books.

Approximately 240 distinct posters were produced between 1932 and 1968. The Národní galerie in Prague holds 158 of them. The remainder are in private collections, scattered estate sales, and (as we discovered in our research) folded into Czech grandmothers’ linen drawers.

This essay is about five of them.

Plate I: “Noc nad vesnicí” (Night Over the Village), Jan Konůpek, 1933

A small village in a valley, viewed from above. The moon is large in the upper right. Six houses, all with one warm window each. The verse, in original Czech: “Spí již vesnice, spí již les / a brzy usneš ty, ó dnes.” (Roughly: “The village sleeps now, the forest sleeps / and soon you will sleep too, this very night.”)

The genius of the plate is the count of lit windows. Each house has exactly one. Six houses, six windows, six points of warmth. The child reading the poster from below is invited to count them. The counting itself is the soothing mechanism.

Plate II: “Měsíc nad lesem” (Moon Over the Forest), Adolf Zábranský, 1937

A dense pine forest, viewed from a low angle. A single round moon. A small owl on a branch — the only animal. The verse is a single quatrain about the owl: that the owl keeps watch so the village can sleep.

Zábranský’s color reduction is striking even by Czech bedtime-poster standards. The plate uses four colors total: a deep prussian blue (the forest), a softer indigo (the sky), a warm cream (the moon), and a single point of yellow (the owl’s eye). The owl’s eye, in the original lithograph, is hand-applied — every printed copy has a slightly different placement of the warm yellow dot. We have seen seven copies. None has the eye in quite the same place.

Plate III: “Dvůr s lampou” (Courtyard With Lamp), Karel Svolinský, 1942

The most affecting of the wartime plates. A small Czech farmstead courtyard, snow on the ground, a single oil lamp in a barn window. No human figures. The verse, in translation: “The lamp is lit. The barn is warm. The animals are inside. The night is here, and the night is good.”

The plate was published in November 1942 — five months after the assassination of Heydrich, in the middle of the Nazi reprisals against the Czech population. It contains no political content. It is, instead, a quiet assertion that domestic warmth still exists, that a small lamp in a barn is still a true thing. We find this one harder to look at than any other in the series.

Plate IV: “Hvězdy nad městem” (Stars Over the City), Cyril Bouda, 1956

A view of Prague rooftops at night. A small child’s face in a window in the foreground. Hundreds of stars overhead, drawn in an unusual technique: tiny scratchwork through the dark pigment, allowing the cream paper underneath to show through. The verse: “Hvězdy spočítáš, dříve než usneš?” (“Will you count the stars before you sleep?”)

Bouda’s scratchwork starfield is, technically, one of the most accomplished pieces of printmaking in the postwar Czech canon. The stars are not painted on. They are removed. We have, in the studio, a 1957 second-run copy of this poster on our wall.

Plate V: “Kočka u kamen” (Cat by the Stove), Helena Zmatlíková, 1964

The last plate we’ll discuss, and one of the last great ones in the genre. A cream-walled kitchen, a black wood stove, a single calico cat curled by the stove. No human figures, no moon, no sky — just the kitchen interior. The verse is in Zmatlíková’s familiar plain register: “Spí kočka. Spi taky.” (“The cat sleeps. You sleep too.”)

Two sentences. Five words. The most reduced text-and-image bedtime poster in the whole genre. It is also, in our view, the warmest of the five.

What this genre teaches

A bedtime poster does, in static form, what a bedtime book does dynamically. It produces a single, persistent, calm image — to be looked at, repeatedly, without narrative pressure. The child sees it every night. The image becomes part of the child’s room, not part of a story.

This is a genre worth reviving. We are aware of a few contemporary illustrators (notably Beatrice Alemagna and the Polish studio Wydawnictwo Dwie Siostry) doing adjacent work. If any of our readers are publishers, designers, or illustrators interested in producing a small contemporary bedtime-poster series — we would very much like to hear about it.

— Theo Klein. Archival images of all five plates are reproduced in the print edition of Issue 04. Source: Národní galerie Praha, Český uspávací plakát 1932–1968, exhibition catalogue, 2018.