The first estate donated to the Library of the House of Representatives was the famous book collection of Ignác Ghyczy (1799–1870), a member of parliament. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the aristocratic family library was composed of a wide array of rare books and periodicals as well as works on politics, law, political science, history, geography, economics, theology, military science, literary studies and fiction published mainly in German, French, Hungarian and Latin. The extremely valuable private collection augmented the library’s holdings with about 20,000 volumes. After its donation, the history of the Ghyczy estate took an interesting turn: thousands of the volumes were lent to various institutions as the library was accommodated in only one room at that time and so there was insufficient space for so many books. From 1928 onwards, the library’s director, Miklós Nagy, did his utmost to recover the volumes but was ultimately not fully successful. Due to poor storage conditions, four boxes of books were destroyed in the years after donation, and 3,000 volumes were destroyed during World War II. After 1945, the books, kept in a separate room in the library during the interwar years, were re-entered into the holdings, where they have been part of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection since 2005. Included among the invaluable rare books in the collection today are Luther’s Bible from 1569, a 14-volume botany book with hand-painted illustrations by Viennese scientist Ferdinand Bernhard Vietz (Icones plantarum... Vienna, 1780-1819), the first casebook in Hungarian (Planum Tabulare, Buda, 1825), and Péter Révai’s work on the Holy Crown (Nagyszombat, 1732).
