The Visible World in Pictures

After more than twenty years, Jan Amos Comenius's unique work – ORBIS SENSUALIUM PICTUS (The World in Pictures) – is being published again and should not be missing from any family or school library. This is a selection from Comenius's linguistic encyclopaedia, which was so far ahead of its time when it was published that it served as a living teaching aid for language learning in the following centuries – in our country until the beginning of the last century. The current edition was prepared by a team of experts led by Assoc. Prof. PhDr. Naděžda Kvítková, CSc. and is supplemented with a comprehensive introduction and commentary on the work.

The new edition contains the original Latin texts and is newly supplemented with parallel translations into modern Czech, German, English, and Russian. An equally important part of the book is the illustrative section, which reproduces the original woodcuts from several historical editions, thus attempting in an unconventional way to compare the development of the visual culture of the period.