Kövy Zsolt - Szabó György - S. dr. Lackovits Emőke: A Pápai Református Gyűjtemény (Pápa, 1987)

Zsolt Kövy: The Calvinist Collection of Pápa

and 500 maps. There are some engraving with the view of the town Pápa from the 17th century. Antal Baldácsi has donated a fine collection of xylographs, etchings, copperplates by German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian artists from the 15th to 19th centuries. There are some splendid works of Dürer, Rembrandt and Rubens. In the collection of medals there are 12 000 Roman, Greek, Barbarian and Hungarian coins as well as jubilee plaquettes. The collection of manuscripts, books concerning the history of the town and college is called PAPENSIA.

The old theatre programs, posters and materials about the world war must be mentioned as well. The antiquarian collection of the former college was presented a 3000 years old Egyptian mummy by Károly Markstein a late college student in 1885. The stock of the library is 150 000 volumes now and can be classified like this: encyclopedia, linguistics, fiction, history, geography, mathematics, natural sciences, pedagogy, law, philosophy, theology, old Hungarian prints, incunabula, manuscripts, smaller prints and independent collection. The collection is being enlarged now in the literature of the reformation and counter-reformation, Protestant theology, the Hungarian reform era, especially Petőfi and Jókai, the students of the Calvinist College of Pápa in 1841—42, literature on Transdanubia, county of Veszprém, town of Pápa, philosophy, ecclesiastical history, history of religion, historical science, social science, fiction.

PAPENSIA and the memorial exhibition of Petőfi are the permanent exhibitioins of the library. They are visited by thousands of people every year.

There were some excellent librarians working on this collection along the centuries. One of them was István Borsos (1897—1918) who has made the catalogues of the library, antiquarian and medal collections and has had them printed during his twenty years of activity. József Pongrácz the librarian of the college (1918—63) has doubled the collection and has made it the third largest and most valuable libraries of Transdanubia, beside founding some new collections.

The library has been working for four centuries and is used by 1000 researchers every year.

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