Collection data:
Collection manager: Nóra Németh, Museologist
Number of pieces in the collection: Approx. 12,000 pcs; The collection is currently being processed. The number of items in some parts of the collection cannot or cannot be precisely determined at the moment, the given number of items can be considered a minimum.
Online availability: Digital Collections
Researchability: The collection can be researched locally on advanced registration.
About the collection:
Our museum’s independent toy collection was established in December 2020. The institution had already collected toys, which were included in the Object Collection of Trade and, to a lesser extent, in the Object Collection of Hospitality. Between 2014 and 2021, the Museum was enriched with three private collections of toys. The collection of playing cards of card researcher Antal Jánoska (1954-) was placed in the custody of our museum between 2014 and 2017, per collection unit. Since December 2020, our institution has been keeping the toy collection of kindergarten teacher Mariann Karlócai (1925-2020). In August 2021, the collection of logical games of Tibor Szentiványi (1931-2009), a well-known computer scientist and game researcher, was officially handed over.
Structure of the collection:
• Base colletion
It includes toys kept by us independently of the three private collections. The majority of the cca. 200-item collection consists of dolls and board games from the 20th century. It contains a smaller number of construction and board games, logical games, card games, animal figures, musical instruments for children, transport and household equipment, and outdoor games. The collection is enriched by a doll room and its accessories (furnishings) and doll clothes.
• Antal Jánoska’s (1954-) Card Collection
1. Playing cards
It consists of about 2,700 card packs (card decks), with many rarities like single known items. In addition to the memories of Hungarian card making in the 19th-20th century, the collection comprehensively shows regional game types from Asia to America. Fortune-telling, children’s and erotic cards form a separate unit. In this section we find the collection of miniature cards, the group of card sheets and card reproductions as well.
2. Relic collection
Aids used for card games or utilities and items decorated with card motifs (glasses, jugs, smoking accessories, clothing, card boxes, card presses, phone cards, posters, match labels, drink labels, stamps, play money, chips, chip holders, etc.) are included in this collection. This unit is also enriched by cards that can also be collected as incomplete packs, such as sets of jokers, back cards, company cards, as well as card-type games and their accessories.
3. Game illustration collection
This collection includes photos depicting card players, locations of the card game or card motifs, postcards, and prints. The collection of relic and toy depictions includes approx. 3000 items.
4. Library
The approx. 600-volume library contains Hungarian and foreign literature on card culture. Among the library materials, we can find a collection of fiction and anecdotes on the subject, as well as magazines and auction catalogs.
5. Archive
It contains copies of all known cards of Hungarian origin, kept in domestic and foreign public collections. There is a database and documents from the field of card production and trade in Hungary, as well. The archive includes the professional correspondence of Antal Jánoska and the documentation of the events created with his participation. The section is enriched by an archive of card images, game descriptions and copies of artefacts depicting card players (photos, photocopies). The collection fills 23 boxes.
• Mariann Karlócai’s (Mrs. Jánosné Karlócai nee Marianne Kelemen, 1925-2020) Toy Collection
The backbone of the collection of more than 4,000 items (the number of objects in 51 boxes is unknown, so the total number of items is probably close to 5,000) represents the bourgeois toy culture of the first half of the 20th century with many extremely valuable pieces. A significant number of toys from the second half of the 20th century are also present in the collection, as well as home-made and custom-made toys.
The most typical types of games in the collection::
- Developmental toys and construction games
- Wind-up and mechanical toys
- Instruments for children
- Dolls
- Textile toys
- Role-playing games for girls (doll furniture, kitchen and household appliances, porcelain sets, dollhouses)
- Role-playing games for boys (animal figures, soldiers, castles, rocking horses, vehicles, models and technical toys)
- Board games
- Outdoor games
- Toy Theatres
• Tibor Szentiványi’s (1931-2009) Logic Game Collection
The collection, which includes more than 1,000 thought-developing games, consists of ten logical game categories. The majority of these Hungarian and foreign games were made in the 1980s and 1990s.
The collection includes the following game types:
- Dissection puzzles (tangram, pentomino, Soma cube)
- Disjoining puzzles (tricky opening boxes, locks)
- Conjoining (burr puzzles, conjoining cubes)
- Disentanglement puzzles (bent nails, meleda, rope puzzles)
- Games based on sequential movement (solitaires, Tower of Hanoi torony, Rubik’s cube)
- Skill games (games that require dexterity, for example skill maze)
- Tricky jugs (crafty ceramic jugs)
- Puzzles with disappearing elements (moving and rotating parts of the game results disappearaing of some elements)
- Folding puzzles (games based on folding planar or spatial shapes)
- Impossible objects (the goal is for the player to figure out how the object could have been made)
Collecting activity:
Toys from the 19th-21st century.
