Map, Poster and Small Print Collection

The department was created in summer 2020 by merging the Poster and Small Print Collection and the Map Collection.

The Map Collection is essentially a collection of hungarica documents. As part of the national library, our task is to collect as comprehensively as possible printed and manuscript cartographic documents relating to Hungary, as well as digitally produced maps, atlases, terrestrial and celestial globes and other relevant documents. As part of a collection of more than 300,000 items, we also hold a significant and valuable collection of works from the entire history of European cartography, in addition to the cartographic material produced in or related to Hungary. In 1802, Count Ferenc Széchényi donated his famous collections to the Hungarian nation, including his collection of maps and atlases of around 6,000 items. This collection, like the collection of graphic documents, has been managed separately from the time of its foundation.

In the Poster and Small Print Collection, specific visual and written documents are systematically collected, processed and made available. The most important of these are graphic posters, engravings and lithographs, ex librises and occasional prints, portfolios, postcards, text posters and leaflets, obituaries, pulp fictions, occasional speeches and poems, dissertation theses, programmes and invitations, dance cards, various calendars, catalogues and registers, official documents and forms of companies and other institutions.

The collection includes small prints printed in Hungary after 1711, as well as those of Hungarian relevance published abroad, and documents of this kind produced through techniques of printmaking.

In total, the collection holds approximately 4 million of these individual documents, making it the largest of the Special Collections of the NSZL and the second largest collection in after the General Collection comprising books and periodicals.