Jan Bata - the famous unknown

It must have been a real experience to meet Jan Antonín Bata. Today hardly anyone can say that he was lucky. The peculiar Hradistan, perhaps a bit loud, but musically skilled and always entertaining companion, who never travelled except with a harmonica, left the republic in 1939, never to return after the war. He could, but only as a defendant in a trial in which the Communists convicted him of treason, from which he was cleared only after his death. In Jan Bata - Known, Unknown, we learn what preceded it: the murder of a shoemaker, from which the whole story of the Batas began to unfold, the apprenticeship years with the shoe king - his half-brother Tomáš - and the almost innate desire to discover. The book is almost a manuscript of Jan's life in its engaging narrative. In addition to previously unpublished photographs, facts, thoughts and essays, it brings together the documents for which he was condemned: the rumoured plan to move the Republic to Patagonia, and the letters he exchanged not only with his brother but with many others.