Staff of Tripont Cultural Heritage Solutions have digitised the most expensive volume signed by a Hungarian writer in the 20th century. It is none other than the Jenő Rejtő volume, owned by a private collector, which sold for HUF 7.5 million.
Jenő Rejtő was already a popular writer in his own time and, to this day, we perhaps regard him as one of the most widely read Hungarian authors, whose volumes are picked up not only by older but also by younger generations. The Rejtő work auctioned over the summer has several special features. The volume Piszkos Fred közbelép – Fülig Jimmy őszinte sajnálatára (“Dirty Fred Steps In – to Fülig Jimmy’s Sincere Regret”) was published under a pseudonym. We know that Rejtő used several pseudonyms in publishing his works; literary scholarship recognises the P. Howard mentioned above and also Gibson Lavery. The auctioned copy counts as pulp. Pulp as a genre is not a 20th-century invention; in the Hungarian public sphere German criminal pulp, the fairground history (vásári história), spread at fairs at the end of the 18th century, from the pens of authors writing anonymously or under pseudonyms. During the long 19th century the genre underwent a loss of value, but remained popular throughout. By the 20th century it appears as a synonym for entertainment literature and popular literature. These cheap, one-krajcár booklets made of poor-quality paper piled up success after success with the interested public, as did the auctioned Fülig Jimmy volume, which appeared in the pengő series of Auróra Publishing House. For quality reasons many volumes were destroyed over the decades. That is why the digitisation and preservation of valuable copies is important.
Hungarian literary scholarship now has a great deal of information about Jenő Rejtő – compared with our earlier knowledge (among others Gergely Thuróczy of the Petőfi Literary Museum researches the life and work of the writer who died young). Rejtő was born in 1905 as the third child of the Reich family of Jewish origin. He tried almost every genre of the entertainment literature of the time, writing pulp novels, operettas and then adventure novels recording his experiences abroad. His most successful works appeared under the pseudonym P. Howard.
The work digitised by Tripont’s staff was signed by Rejtő for Miklós Haumann on 24 July 1941. “To my esteemed ‘big brother’ Miki Haumann, with the respectful reminder that he is to read it. Your devoted Jenő Rejtő” – who Dr Haumann was is not known; literary scholarship still owes an answer on this. The date of the inscription is important, however, because in 1942, seriously ill, Rejtő was taken to forced labour service because of his origins, on the basis of an Arrow Cross denunciation, and he never returned from there; he died in 1942, aged 37, on the territory of the Soviet Union.
The surviving inscribed copy of the tragically fated writer came to the Central Antiquarian Bookshop (Központi Antikvárium) by chance. The former owner dug the inscribed copy out of the depths of a chest – along with many other volumes. A further special feature of the Rejtő volume is that we know of only two works signed by the author. One is the privately held Piszkos Fred közbelép – Fülig Jimmy őszinte sajnálatára mentioned above, the other is Csontbrigád (“The Bone Brigade”) in the collection of the Petőfi Literary Museum, which the author inscribed in 1941 to László Kovács and to Magda Kovács, his typist.
Tripont staff digitised the cherished book in top quality with the Phase One camera system developed for photographing flat objects. The camera is the market leader in the digitisation of cultural heritage. With the help of the specialists of Tripont Cultural Heritage Solutions, preservation-grade digitisation of objects becomes available to private individuals and public institutions alike.
Sources:
https://kultura.hu/rejto-egy-irodalmi-lakmuszpapir/
https://ectopolis.hu/hirek/arveresre-kerult-a-ket-ismert-dedikalt-rejto-jeno-kotet-egyike/
István Békés: Magyar ponyva pitaval [Hungarian Pulp Pitaval]. Minerva, Budapest, 1966
Péter Pogány: A magyar ponyva tüköre [The Mirror of Hungarian Pulp]. Helikon, Budapest, 1978.
Orsolya Sári: Az ellopott tragédia [The Stolen Tragedy]. In: Kortárs, 2016, July–December, no. 12, pp. 85–88.
Gergely Thuróczy: Az ellopott tragédia – Rejtő Jenő – emlékkötet [The Stolen Tragedy – Jenő Rejtő – Memorial Volume]. Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum, Budapest, 2015.
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