Before the late 1950s, books rarely appeared in colour, because of high printing costs. Then, the German-Polish-British publisher Paul Hamlyn struck a deal with Artia, a state-controlled publishing house in Czechoslovakia (then in the so-called Eastern Bloc), which had high-quality but low-cost, four-colour presses. As a result, not only did Hamlyn bring out a whole series of legendary British-authored books, such as Marguerite Patten’s Cookery in Colour, but also English translations of Czechoslovak books.