Nurturing Democracy : Books: Studio City woman heads a national effort she hopes will result in tons of volumes being sent to Czechoslovakia. : Books: Studio City woman heads a national effort that she hopes will result in tons of volumes being sent to Czechoslovakia.

Freud. Adam Smith. Rousseau. Shakespeare.

For decades, the works of these and other Western thinkers and artists were banned in Czechoslovakia by leaders who feared the spread of their ideas would undermine the communist regime.

But Czechoslovakia’s new leaders--artists and intellectuals--have different ideas about ideas. As they nurture their fragile new democracy, they want citizens exposed to the full range of Western thought.

But with limited foreign currency, the country’s leaders cannot afford to buy books to stock their nation’s stunted libraries, a spokesman for the Czech embassy in Washington said.

So Terri New, a Studio City performance artist, is organizing a national campaign that she hopes will ultimately send tons of volumes to Czechoslovakia.

“They are trying to restructure a whole society and they have minimal information,” New said. “Books open up so many avenues and doors.”

New, who said she met many leaders of the new government on two trips to Czechoslovakia last year, is collecting classic plays and novels, works of social science theory, and recent editions of news magazines and scientific and intellectual journals. She is working with Continental Airlines to develop a plan to ship the books to Europe in September.

A Continental spokesman at the airline’s headquarters in Houston said the airline is seriously considering her request to ferry the books to Europe for free.

New has collected dozens of boxes of books, she said, and is storing them in a friend’s large garage in Manhattan Beach. When the garage is full, she said, she will look for more space.

The rapid motion of her hands keeping pace with the flow of her words, New’s admiration for the peaceful Czechoslovakian revolution pours out as she tells the story behind the book campaign.

New, whose maternal grandparents left Czechoslovakia as Hitler’s armies marched through Europe, was disheartened on her first visit to the country last October. The students, she said, doubted that the communist regime would be overthrown, or that conditions in their country would ever improve.

So when the revolution occurred, she was compelled to return, partly because of the personal affinity she said she feels with the Czechoslovakian people. “The theme of a lot of my work as an artist deals with the repressed individual and the tools they use for transformation and here was a whole country transforming itself,” New said.

“I was so touched with their courage, with their conviction to keep it a humane revolution, without violence,” New said. “I had a compelling drive to get there to witness this history unfold.”

When she returned in February, New said, she brought with her newspapers and magazine accounts of the Czechoslovakian revolution.

Leaders told her that “this was the first they had seen from the outside world of their revolution,” she said.

Her own bookshelves, stocked with an eclectic mix of authors including Gunter Grass, Steven Hawking, Evelyn Waugh, Will Durant and Graham Greene are a testament to her belief in the power of words and the value of ideas.

“This was not a revolution about food; these people were relatively well fed. It was a revolution about starvation of the soul,” she said. “Anything that dealt with the heart and mind, they were not allowed to study. Anything spiritual was not allowed.”

“Everyone I talked to when I was there, when I asked what I could send them back from America, they all said ‘books’--without exception,” she said.

A spokesman from the Czechoslovakian embassy confirmed that before the revolution, so-called “Western propaganda” was unavailable to common citizens, unless they could get their hands on one of the faded, purple-ink photocopies that were circulated illicitly among certain groups.

The work of Czechoslovakian emigre writers such as Milan Kundera was also forbidden.

Being caught with such materials could result in imprisonment, said embassy press secretary Daniel Veseley.

Now that the political barriers are gone, Czechoslovakians still face economic obstacles in their efforts to obtain books, Veseley said.

The Czech crown is not easily converted to dollars, making it difficult to purchase books from American publishing companies, he said. Although the national languages of Czechoslovakia are Czech and Slovak, many citizens speak and read English, he said.

With collection bins set up at six bookstores in Los Angeles and plans for more in other cities under way, New hopes to feed the hunger for intellectual materials. But she acknowledges she might have to sift through a substantial amount of junk to find books appropriate for Czechoslovakia’s libraries.

For example, a box of books left recently at New’s apartment contained--among other things--a copy of “New York Bargain Finder 1988” pulp fiction and “Final Cut,” a book on the motion picture financial disaster “Heaven’s Gate.”

New hopes that people will not simply use the booklift as an excuse to clean out their garages, but will donate books with literary or intellectual value.

“This is a gift to the people there,” she said. “They gave such a gift to the world in the way that they conducted themselves. They are such an example to other repressed countries, and I want to honor that.”