Andreas Hess

Andreas Hess

Andreas Hess
Written by Gedeon Borsa
Edited by Judit P. Vásárhelyi and Péter Perger
NSZL–HAS Research Center for the Humanities, Institute for Literary Studies–MOKKA-R Association 2013, 221 pages
[Booklets of Hungarian Book Review and MOKKA-R Association, 6.]
ISBN 978 963 446 703 8

Language: 
Hungarian
2 500,- Ft
Not available
Teljes bibliográfiai leírás/Library catalogue item

2013 is a significant anniversary year for Hungarian book history and its research. It was 540 years ago, on 5 June 1473, that Andreas Hess completed the printing of the first Hungarian incunabulum, Chronica Hungarorum in Buda. Besides, 10 October 1923 (90 years ago) was the birthday of book and culture historian Gedeon Borsa, a renowned expert of worldwide and Hungarian book history research and bibliothecarius emeritus of National Széchényi Library. To mark this double anniversary, NSZL has published this work by Gedeon Borsa on Andreas Hess in cooperation with the Institute for Literary Studies of the Research Center for the Humanities at Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Hungarian Book Review.

No similar comprehensive work on Andreas Hess has been available for the readers since 1932 when a monograph by József Fitz, the master of Gedeon Borsa, was published in Budapest. The disciple has been studying the beginning of the first printing press in Hungary for decades now. Without archive sources to lean on, he examined the remaining and now worldwide scattered copies of two books of the Hess printing press and took them as a starting point. Upon thorough study of these he recurred to the research of letter-types to clarify several questions of philology, content and technique. Yet he does not regard this work as a monograph on Hess, just recommends it to the readers as a small item from his own workshop.

Booklets of Hungarian Book Review and MOKKA-R Association

For centuries, books were the only means of passing on cultural values, so the history of books is related to all the areas of cultural history. No wonder that a number of new institutions for presenting book culture history are currently being set up. As one of Europe’s oldest book history periodicals, Hungarian Book Review cannot assume the publication of all the writings on book history in Hungary, it has joined MOKKA-R (the old books section of Hungarian National Joint Catalogue Association), an entity founded in 1994 to coordinate the elaboration of old books. Our series of booklets presents primarily the lectures held at the MOKKA-R department sessions, but also gives room for works on book history with larger extent than publishable in Hungarian Book Review.

The publishers of the series are NSZL, the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Science, and MOKKA-R Association.