Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1993

Kiállítási emlékezések - Angol nyelvű összefoglalók

There are several thousand photographs and albums. The oldest item is a full-length group portrait entitled “The Students of the First Royal National Hungarian Women’s Telegraph Training Course of 1871There is very ample material from the decades before and after the turn of the century, when the Royal Hungarian Post Office, a match for the best in the world at that time, employed the most famous Hungarian photographers: Mór Erdélyi, György Klösz and many others. From the two photographers named alone, the Museum possesses 22 albums and innumerable mounted photographs.

Among the chroniclers of the inter-war period were photographers of the Post Office Experimental Institute. Almost nothing is known of them personally, but from their work they emerge as meticulous, high-standard photographers. The post-1945 photographs begin with pictures of the war damage. Then comes material done to order by photographers of the Hungarian News Agency between 1957 and 1980.

An integral part of the collection are the individual and group portraits, and the albums and tableaux of these. They cover and reflect the approach of each and every period.

Júlia Kisfaludi: p. 61

Telephone Cards in the Postal Museum

Hungary has had telephone cards and public phones that operate with them since June 1991. In September of the same year, the Postal Museum received a collection of 200 telephone cards from the then head of the telecom company Matáv, and these were placed in the collection on telecommunications history.

Articles in newspapers and business journals and the personal experience of users soon prompted the idea of actively collecting telephone cards.

We wrote to István Lipp, Commercial Manager of Matáv, asking for 50 copies of each Hungarian telephone card issued and explaining that we wished to preserve these in our archives and use them to exchange for foreign cards.

On June 2 the collection of Hungarian cards became complete and up-to-date, and deliberate, methodical exchanging began. It was decided at a board-of-trustees meeting in the same month that the cards would be placed in the thematic collection, catalogued under Inventory Nos. 29.800 (Hungarian) and 29.801 (foreign).

By the end of 1993, the size of the collection had increased to 293 cards, through exchanges with equivalent museums and collection work by the Telephone Museum staff. This can be said to constitute a good basis for a new collection, on which to build and expand.

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