Posters, small prints, reproduced graphics

Engravings and lithographs, guild and mastership charters, loose-leaf albums and the several ten thousand-strong collection of ex librises, which have been collected since 1712, preserve the image documents of Hungarian cultural history, and within this, the history of the Hungarian art. One such example is the heritage of graphic artist Lenke Diskay, comprising ex librises and artefacts.

Among image documents, the collection also includes a huge bulk of bills and devotional pictures. The archive’s big collection of picture postcards provides rich source material for, among others, research in local history and ethnography.

Another major part of the Collection of Posters and Small Prints are the text-based documents among which you can find mainly small and tiny prints. Small prints, included in the name of this collection, are text-based publications made by printing technology or by any other reproduction process, the size of which does not exceed a maximum of one printing sheet. Printing houses often use a printing sheet of this size folded several times, especially for the production of yellow backs, speeches and poems written for special occasions, for theses of old dissertations or small-size, legal prints as well as for the production of the previously mentioned text-based prints. Within the category of small prints, there are the so-called tiny prints which include text-based documents of the size of one or two sheets. Tiny prints are, for example, documents belonging to the nearly 400,000-item collection part comprising text-based posters.

The obituary collection of Collection of Posters and Small Prints plays an especially important role among tiny prints, since it serves as an essential source for Hungarian genealogical research. Such small-size documents of the Collection of Posters and Small Prints are regarded as a significant part of the Archive, even if they have always been easily destroyable and of ephemeral type. Just think about various PR prints, graphic or text-based posters, leaflets, invitation cards or obituaries. Out of the large amount of festive speeches, brochures, catalogues, calendars, playbills, invitation cards, menu cards, menus as well as dance cards, you can put together the everyday life of people having lived in days gone by.

Various parts of the collection, depicting different eras in the history Hungary, are also highly important. For instance, the World War I Collection of the archive includes several tens of thousands of documents. In the past couple of years, historical documents of the revolutions and fights for freedom of 1848-1849 and 1956 have been processed. NSZL’s posters and leaflets from 1956 are all digitized and can be studied via our website or in the database of Hungarian Digital Image Library.

Lately, the Collection of Posters and Small Prints has been growing by an annual amount of approximately 40,000 items comprising mainly documents arriving in NSZL as legal deposits.