33 
The History of the Book in Hungary
33 BRIDGET GUZNER
The earliest Hungarian written records are closely linked to Christian culture and the Latin language. The first codices were copied and introduced by travelling monks on their arrival in the country during the 10th century, not long after the Magyar tribes had conquered and settled in the Carpathian Basin. Written records were primarily created in monasteries; however, legal and other official documents were produced by an ecclesiastical body (‘loca credibilia’) unique to Hungary. This legal institution continued to operate in convents and chapter houses, issuing certified records in chancery script to laymen and the clergy until 1874. The earliest ecclesiastical library, founded in 996, was that of the Benedictine monastery of Pannonhalma. Its MS holdings included as many as 250 liturgical and classical works by Cicero, Lucan, Donatus, and Cato, but the original library repeatedly fell prey to fire and only one codex survives from it. The cathedral libraries of Pécs (where there had also been a university, founded in 1367 but which closed in 1390), Veszprém, and Esztergom were destroyed following the continuous expansion of the Ottoman empire and the battle of Mohács, where the Turkish army, led by Süleyman I, attacked and defeated Hungarian forces in August 1526.
In the 14th century Hungarian students frequently studied at European universities, especially in Cracow, Vienna, Bologna, and Padua. On their return, they were reported to have owned small libraries, but none of their booklists survives. Information on the origins and subsequent fate of the most significant medieval MSS is scant. The Gesta Hungarorum (c.1200) chronicles the history of the Hungarians from the beginnings till the Árpáds’ conquest of Hungary. Written by the unidentified Magister P. (sometimes referred to as ‘Anonymus’) during the reign of King Béla III (1172–96), the book had been held abroad since its creation, only to be repatriated to the National Library of Hungary from Vienna in the 20th century. The most impressive historical work of the Hungarian Middle Ages is the chronicle (also called Gesta Hungarorum) of Simon Kézai, the court chaplain of Ladislas IV, written in 1282–5. The Leuven Codex of the late 13th century is a collection of MS sermons, including the first fragment of Hungarian literary text, known as Ómagyar Máriasiralom (Old Hungarian Lamentations of the Blessed Virgin), written on vellum at Orvieto by Dominican monks, three of whom were Hungarian. The Belgian university of Leuven (Louvain) finally agreed to give it to Hungary in 1982.
The first Hungarian printed book was produced in the Buda printing house of Andreas Hess at Whitsuntide in 1473, at the invitation of and with financial support from the city’s provost, Vice-Chancellor László Karai. Hess, who was probably German, had left Rome for Buda—the spiritual and administrative centre of the Empire formed by the famous collector Matthias Corvinus—and proceeded to set up his printing office. Over the next five months, he produced his Chronica Hungarorum (also known as the Buda Chronicle). He cast his letters from matrices imported from George Lauer’s press in Rome, and used the same paper and fount in his second, undated book printed in Buda. It comprised two works: Basil the Great’s De Legendis Poetis and Xenophon’s Apologia Socratis, with the colophon ‘.A: .H. Bude.’ at the end of the first work.
Between 1477 and 1480, an unknown printer produced three more incunabula, most likely in Hungary, but at an unidentified place of printing. The first was the Confessionale of Antoninus Florentinus, archbishop of Florence; the second, Laudivius Zacchia’s Vita Beati Hieronymi; and the third, a broadside indulgence granted by Canon Johannes Han to Agnes de Posonio (dated, by hand, 11 May 1480), was discovered near Pozsony (now Bratislava). All three documents were probably printed by a small itinerant press in Hungary from type cast from matrices attributed to the press of the Neapolitan Matthias Moravus.
Popular interest in MSS and books continued after the cessation of the two earliest printing offices. Foreign booksellers in Buda supplied the clergy and the royal court with books printed in Venice or MSS commissioned from Germany. Of nine Buda publishers, only two are known to have been Hungarian. Theobald Feger was the first in Hungary to sell Latin and German editions of Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle, printed by Anton Koberger. The most notable publication of the age, however, was János Thuróczy’s (Johannes de Thwrocz) Chronica Hungarorum, printed in March 1488 in Brünn (Brno) for János Filipec, bishop of Olmütz (Olomouc). As Filipec’s church press had no suitable type for secular works, his printers, Conrad Stahel and Mathias Preunlein, used the gothic founts of missals and a large number of high-quality woodcut illustrations. The Chronica was reprinted in June of the same year in Augsburg by Erhard Ratdolt with a printer’s device designed by Feger. This second edition, dedicated to Matthias Corvinus, was illustrated with more woodcuts, and is still the best-known and most distinguished incunable associated with Hungary, owned by many European and US libraries.
The royal Hungarian book collector, King Matthias Corvinus, depicted in a woodcut illustration to the Chronica Hungarorum by János Thuróczy (Johannes de Thwrocz), printed at Augsburg in 1488. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. IB 6664, Page 148.
For most districts of Royal Hungary, the battle of Mohács (1526) and the subsequent Turkish occupation were followed by 150 years of turmoil, loss of independence, and economic degradation. Hungarian centres of humanist and literary thought were destroyed and Hungarian books came to be printed abroad, mainly in Cracow and Vienna. Thus, the first book printed entirely in Hungarian, an edition of St Paul’s Epistles, translated and with a commentary by Benedek Komjáti (a follower of Erasmus), was produced at Cracow in 1533 by Hieronymus Vietor.
The traumatic experience of Mohács was associated with the birth of the Reformation. The reformers’ teachings spread in the 1520s, gaining ground in the relatively secure region of Transylvania, the only Hungarian territory to have escaped Turkish occupation. In Braşov, Johannes Honterus (1498–1549), a learned reformer of the Transylvanian Saxons, set up his printing press in the early 1530s and went on to produce more than 35 works in Latin, Greek, and German. Still in Braşov, the first books in Romanian printed with Cyrillic types were attributed to Coresi, the deacon, printer, and editor who promoted vernacular Romanian in church as the official written language. More than 30 of his books were circulated throughout the Romanian lands. Another town that played an important role in the printing of Latin and Hungarian books while upholding Protestant reform was Kolozsvár (Cluj). There, Gáspár Heltai, preacher, writer, and pre-eminent theorist of the Hungarian Reformation, founded a famous printing office (originally, with György Hoffgreff) in 1550. Between 1559 and 1575, it produced 45 works in Hungarian, Latin, and Greek, all enriched with attractive woodcut illustrations. Heltai initially printed religious works, but he later turned to more secular genres: romances, tales, and legends. After his death, his wife continued to print less prestigious but no less entertaining chronicles in verse.
Other printers during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation produced material aimed at serving and supporting Hungarian Protestantism. The most significant of these, Gál Huszár, established his printing office first in Magyaróvár (Mosonmagyaróvár), then in Kassa (Košice). He later settled in Debrecen to print and publish the works of the Reformed bishop Péter Juhász Melius (1532–72). In 1555, Raphael Hoffhalter settled in Vienna, where his printing office produced 123 Latin and Hungarian publications during the following seven years. His Protestantism made him flee, in 1563, to Debrecen, where the quality of his books and engravings surpassed those of his predecessors. Between 1588 and 1590, Bálint Mantskovits established a printing office in Vizsoly, producing the first complete Hungarian Protestant Bible. The Vizsoly Bible, translated by Gáspár Károlyi, is considered the finest undertaking of 16th-century Hungarian printing.
Under Habsburg domination, there were two noteworthy workshops on Hungarian territory. One was in Nagyszombat (Trnava), the centre of the Counter-Reformation at the time, where the Grand Provost Miklós Telegdi founded his press in 1578 and produced superb examples of baroque printing. The other press was located in Bártfa (Bardejov): its master printer, David Guttgesel, used attractive German types, borders, and ornaments in his Latin, Hungarian, and German books.
Most 17th-century Transylvanian Protestant printers, however, learned their art in workshops in The Netherlands. Ábrahám Szenczi Kertész became acquainted with Dutch book production while studying in Leiden. He founded his printing office in Nagyvárad (Oradea) in 1640 and printed more than 100 books, mostly in Hungarian. János Brewer brought his finely cut Dutch types back from Holland to his press at Lőcse (Levoča) to produce, with his brother Samuel, exquisite editions of Johann Amos Comenius’ work, as well as the famous calendars of Lőcse.
Nicholas Kis followed the same pattern, starting his apprenticeship with the Blaeu family in Amsterdam, improving his type designing, cutting, and printing skills. By 1685 he had produced 3,500 copies of his Amsterdam Bible. In 1686 he published the Book of Psalms, translated by Albert Szenczi Molnár, and the New Testament in the following year. His European fame led to commissions from Holland, Germany, England, Sweden, and Poland. His Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, and Armenian types, cut with meticulous expertise, further enhanced his reputation. On his return to Kolozsvár, he brought together municipal and church presses, and in the next nine years published more than 100 finely printed inexpensive books, including the scholarly works of Ferenc Pápai Páriz, the scientist and compiler of a Latin–Hungarian dictionary. Kis strove to stamp out illiteracy and cultural backwardness and to develop a uniform Hungarian orthography.
In Transylvania the princes Gábor Bethlen (r. 1613–29) and György Rakóczi I (r. 1630–48) sought to deprive indigenous Romanians of their national rights and to convert them to Calvinism. The Romanians responded with a developing sense of patriotism, striving to promote their unified literary language. The Romanian New Testament (Alba Iulia, 1648), printed by its translator, Simion Ştefan, Metropolitan of Transylvania, during the autonomous province’s golden age, was part of this process. Romanian printing with Cyrillic characters reappeared in 1733 in a calendar printed in Braşov and produced by the schoolteacher Petcu Şoanul. Enlisting the help of experienced Hungarian printers, Bishop Petru Pavel Aaron refurbished the Blaj printing works with new Cyrillic and Latin founts, as well as high-quality materials and typographic equipment, to produce large numbers of Romanian school textbooks and primers. This was a step towards a new age of secular culture.
After the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773, the Nagyszombat University and Press, formerly under Jesuit leadership, was moved to Buda in 1777 to be managed by the printer Mátyás Trattner (1745–1828). In 1779, it was licensed to print and distribute textbooks for all Hungarian schools, but it also enthusiastically distributed Reform literature. Reorganizing and expanding production under Sámuel Falka Bikfalvi’s direction, Buda’s university press employed nineteen typefounders to supply most of the country’s presses. Falka’s types show the influence of foreign printers and designers, such as Didot and Giambattista Bodoni. As manager of the foundry, Falka renewed his types (much admired by the author Ferenc Kazinczy) while developing and producing beautiful wood and copperplate engravings.
Throughout the 18th century, printing offices opened in Eger, Esztergom, Temesvár (Timişoara), Pécs, Nagykároly (Carei), and Kassa (Košice), but none reached the high standards of the Debrecen or Kolozsvár workshops. By the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, competition among the growing number of printers forced prices and quality down. The development of lithography resulted in the break-up of technical and commercial networks; typographical traditions and aesthetic considerations were disregarded. With the mass production on cheap paper of ephemera, daily newspapers (see 16), books, and journals, typographic standards sank to low levels.
The 19th-century Reform Movement sought to promote Hungary’s economic and cultural progress. To eradicate the country’s cultural backwardness, Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860) became the founder and sponsor of various projects and reforming institutions, including the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His political writings, in which he argued that Hungary should remain loyal to the Austrian empire, were mostly printed by the newly founded TrattnerKárolyi Press. Another representative of the Reform Era was the printer and bookseller Gusztáv Emich (1814–69). During his 26-year publishing career he produced 663 works, of which 629 were in Hungarian. His printing and publishing enterprise effectively created the Athenaeum Literary and Joint Stock Limited Printing Company (1868), which by the end of the century had become the best-equipped printing establishment in the country.
Pallas, the country’s largest printing and publishing firm, was founded in 1884. It boasted a modern typefoundry, a lithographic press, a bindery, rotary-offset and intaglio printing presses. Besides books, it produced journals as well as commercial and official documents. The eighteen-volume Pallas encyclopaedia (1893–1900) turned the Pallas Literary and Printing Company into Hungary’s most prestigious enterprise. As the smaller printing offices gradually replaced their obsolete equipment with modern machinery, they developed advertising techniques and widened their business networks. Towards the end of the 19th century, the spread of literacy increased the demand for books so rapidly that booksellers became publishers. They sponsored Hungarian literature and produced editions of national classics, large press runs of popular fiction, cheap newspapers, series of complete works, and translations of popular authors, making contemporary world literature available to a Hungarian readership. By 1895, there were 104 printing offices in the capital, and their products began to reflect the elements of the eclectic and Art Nouveau styles.
The Kner printing and publishing firm at Gyoma, founded in 1882, adopted the theories and practices of earlier typographers and contemporary designers. The family business was at its peak in the 1920s. Following losses suffered in the war, Imre Kner (1890–1945) and Lajos Kozma (1884–1948) revived the typographic traditions of the baroque period, combining them with modern-day typesetting technology. They produced remarkable works such as the ‘Monumenta Literarum’ and the ‘Kner Classics’ series. The Kner Press was the first to announce the liberation of Hungary following World War II. It continued to function under the directorship of the designer, printer, and researcher György Haiman (1914–96), until it was nationalized in 1949.
Between the wars, the traditions of prestigious later 19th-century publishers—Athenaeum, Révai Brothers, and Singer & Wolfner—in producing important titles in small editions, with little art or music publishing, were continued. World War II and the Communist takeover in 1948 changed everything virtually overnight. All publishing houses, booksellers, and printers were nationalized. The new copyright law stripped publishers of their rights; those not closed down were amalgamated with larger socialist enterprises responsible for publishing within rigidly defined fields. Under the general censorship of the Ministry of Culture, which was ruled by the Communist Party, and the Book Commission, their main task was to educate the masses. During the 1950s, publishing houses were based on Soviet patterns and integrated into a strongly centralized system. In 1952, the trade licences of 182 booksellers and 153 stationers were revoked; the subjects assigned to the newly appointed publishing houses remained unchanged for the following 35 years.
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the political authorities chose which literary works were to be supported or tolerated, and which to be banned and their authors silenced by the general Directorate of Publishing. Although this system of ideological control remained unchanged for more than 40 years, censorship gradually became more relaxed; economic difficulties led to dwindling state subsidies; and the 1980s began to see a technically developed and intellectually strong publishing industry able to satisfy a readership that was by now aware of Communism’s impending collapse. Samizdat books did not have the important role in Hungary that they had in other Soviet bloc countries. By the end of the 1980s, there was little to distinguish samizdat from ‘official’ publications. The Hungarian Writers’ Association became a stronghold of dissent as well as a centre of political opposition. Its leaders played an important role in the movement that marked the end of dictatorship. In 1987–8, the Europa publishing house produced Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, and, in 1989, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, all in excellent Hungarian translations.
The title page of Ő´szi harmat után (‘After autumn dew’), a collection of poems compiled by György Király, printed and published by Izidor Kner at Gyoma in 1921, with Lajos Kozma’s woodcut vignette. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. 11587 b 49, title page
In 1989, censorship and state control over publishing were officially lifted. Legally registered companies were free to engage in publishing. Focusing chiefly on bestselling books and popular fiction, huge editions of previously banned literature were distributed by the burgeoning number of publishers and street vendors throughout the country.
After 1993, two of the previously state-owned distributors were privatized and remodelled to meet modern needs. This resulted in the creation of well-appointed large bookshops and the emergence of a balanced book market. Hungary had been one of the earliest European countries to be admitted into the International Publishers Association, hosting the first international conference of publishers in 1913. In 1998, the Hungarian Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Association (MKKE) joined the prestigious European Publishers’ Federation and the European Booksellers’ Federation, and in 1999 the country was chosen as guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair, considerably enhancing its standing on the European cultural scene. In the 2000s, Hungarian publishing has been characterized by trends common throughout Europe: growth in sales volume; better quality production; greater variety of titles; expansion of bookshop chains; the establishment of web-based bookstores; and the expansion of electronic publishing.
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