É. Apor (ed.): Jubilee Volume of the Oriental Collection, 1951–1976. Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

É. Apor: Sándor Kégl' s Bequest and the Persian Manuscripts in the Oriental Collection

39 "Coming now to speak of individual gifts and bequests, I would like to refer in particular to gifts presented by Sir Aurél Stein and the late János Kégl. ... The late János Kégl presented the library of his late brother, Sándor Kégl, University Professor and Corresponding Member of the Academy to the Library, in accordance with his brother' s expressed desire.Among the works in a collection amassed with graet care and at great expense over many decades are 75Oriental, principally Persian, manuscripts. Although Sándor Kégl'

s main and most comprehensive interest lay in works on Persian and the Semitic world, he also collected original literature and background literary material in Urdu and Sanskrit. Persian belleslettres and Arabic and Persian historical literature are very well represented in the collection. The presentation also greatly increases the value and number of dictionaries in the Library. " We can certainly endorse the Chief Librarian's report for Kégl's library with its 11,000 volumes as one of the largest and richest presentations the Academy Library has ever received. It can be mentioned in the same breath as the 30,000 volume Teleki library which formed the basis of the Academy Library or the Ráth library with its collection of pre-1711 books in Hungarian and on Hungarian subjects, Sir Aurél Stein' s library of books on Central Asia and Dávid Kaufmann'

s collection of Hebraica and Judaica. Soon after the Library received the Kégl collection, the work of classifying and cataloguing began. Printed books were added to current stock, "Kégl-library" being noted in the cards of catalogue , manuscripts were added to Oriental manuscripts. Unfortunately an inventory of books and manuscripts in the collection was found to be missing at the time. It has not yet come to light. Sándor Kégl was connected in a number of ways with the Academy Library. It was he, according to library reports in Academy Bulletins, who completed the cataloguing of the Oriental manuscripts. Indeed the reports chart the progress of his work over many years. He also described all 62 Persian manuscripts (0.

1-42, Q. 1-7, F. 1-13) then in the possession of the Academy Library in a summary catalogue, thus making them considerably more accessible to research scholars. From these 62 manuscripts seven were presented to the Library by Bertalan ÓNODY in 18 76 and forty were purchased around 1886 as part of the SZILÁGYI collection. [13 j In 1914 with Ármin VÁMBÉR Y's bequest 11 Persian manuscripts came into the possession of the Academy Library (O. 43-50, 52-53, and F. 14). The KÉGL collection contained 59 Persian manuscripts (O. 54-91, Q. 23-27, F. 15), thus almost doubling the Persian manuscripts in the possession of the Library to 133. A further three manuscripts were bequeathed to the Library by Sir Aurél STEIN (O. 93, 96, F. 18) and one was presented by Vladimir MINORSKY (O. 92). In the fifties a number of manuscripts were purchased by the Academy Library. Now the Oriental Collection has 144 Persian manuscripts in its possession. They are arranged according to traditional classification and numbered in sequence according to octave, quarto and folio size in the same way as Turkish and Arabic manuscripts. Only the 11 manuscripts in the Vámbéry bequest have been described in a printed catalogue. [14] We have long intended to produce an academically researched