Promoted artworks

Collections

  • Literature and art

  • The Petőfi Literary Museum was established as the legal successor of Petőfi House in 1954. Thus it inherited the basis of its old book collection. The nearly half a million stock of books at present has been growing since then.

  • The PLM’s Manuscript Collection holds one of Hungary’s largest compilations of literary documents. Its scope of collecting covers 19th to 21st-century Hungarian literature in Hungary and over its borders, as well as works originating in emigration.

  • Its history and growth are very similar to that of the book collection. Striving for completeness, the library collects periodicals of Hungarian literature in and outside Hungary, of art, criticism and linguistics, literary historical and theoretical journals, periodicals of borderline fields and the arts and political, social historical papers of the last century. At present the collection contains approximately 2200 periodical titles.
  • The number of photographs in the collection may be put at around 30,000. A significant part consists of writers’ portraits and group photographs, and some of the photographs have a primarily documentary value – family photographs or simple ID photos.
  • At the end of the 19th century, the Petőfi Society compiled the relics of Sándor Petőfi and those of the Petőfi family, including the poet’s objects of personal use.

  • One half of the collection is represented by items of bequests and literary circles, and individual or signed documents. The other half comprises less spectacular lots but with documentary value, such as invitations, leaflets and death notices.

  • The sound archive, which today comprises some 8000 recordings, was established in 1967. As a supplementary part, the collection of films and video recordings with a literary theme, currently totalling 3000, began increasing in the middle of the 1990s.

  • This consists of three main collection units: one concerning the history of the museum, another handling museum documentation, and a third being the Records Office. It has the task of recording and processing in an up-to-date manner all the collections of the museum and the source documents relating to the increase of art objects, i.e. the  Accession Register can be found here.