How Tomáš Sanetrník built Avion, Czechia’s biggest bookshop

Tomáš Sanetrník, founder of the Liberec antiquarian bookshop Avion, turned a childhood passion for collecting books into one of Czechia’s largest secondhand book businesses — a company with annual revenue of roughly 60 million crowns, a stock of three-quarters of a million books, 25 permanent staff and around fifty seasonal workers.

The story began with no business plan and no investment — literally by hitchhiking. As a teenager, Sanetrník visited Liberec’s state-run antiquarian bookshop every day, studying books not just for their content but for their bindings, design and illustrations. After the revolution, a chance encounter changed the young collector’s fate: Jaroslav Frič, a legendary Liberec book dealer, gave him a lift after returning from a major book purchase. “We shook hands right there in the car,” Sanetrník recalls. He spent the next thirty years buying, appraising and studying books.

Ten years ago, Sanetrník founded his own antiquarian bookshop, Avion, which today occupies an entire 1,500-square-metre floor of the Forum shopping centre in Liberec — space originally earmarked for open-plan offices. Instead, it is filled with bookshelves and banana crates packed with everything from modern bestsellers to sixteenth-century volumes, samizdat publications, posters, postcards, prints and vinyl records.

What sets Avion apart from its online antiquarian rivals, who focus on modern stock with ISBN codes, is its enormous range and its founder’s decades of experience. “No algorithm can handle old editions, collectibles and rarities. What you need there, above all, is experience,” says the entrepreneur, who has handled tens of millions of books over the years — these days around 25,000 a week.

Every week, the Avion team visits dozens of homes across the country, most often clearing book collections after an owner’s death or a move. That is how real treasures occasionally turn up among ordinary titles — recently, one such collection yielded an incunabulum, a Spanish-Latin dictionary printed before 1500.

By the Around Prague newsroom