The spa involves long moments that need to be shortened - by reading newspapers and books, writing letters and postcards, or even painting. Dobroslav Krejza and his shop on the ground floor of the Military Spa Institute, which proudly bore the name "The First Czech Bookstore-Paper Shop", offered a solution to all this.
Krejza (pictured on the right) came to Karlovy Vary as a twenty-year-old young man in 1894 and started as a worker in a printing house. His life's work was fundamentally influenced by the Slavic Beseda, a building and institution opened in 1903 as a centre for Karlovy Vary's Czech minority. He began to perform amateur theatre there and later, as a businessman, he supported the Czech amateur theatre.
His bookstore and stationery shop in the centre of Karlovy Vary proudly proclaimed its Czech identity. But of course it also offered German newspapers, and above all the international press, from the French Le Figaro to the Polish Głos Narodu to the Swedish Svenska Dagbladet and many others.
During the war, Krejza was imprisoned by the Nazis for a long time because he was exposed as a pre-war liaison of the Czechoslovak army. From Karlovy Vary he sent reports to Prague about the situation in the Czech borderlands during Munich. Fortunately, he survived the war and was a respected figure in Karlovy Vary afterwards. He died at the age of 89 on 22 November 1963.
Source: the Imperial Spa, Stanislav Burachovich Collection, photographs of the First Czech Bookshop-Paper Mill in Karlovy Vary by Dobroslava Krejza