DLA034-0074  Translation

Budapest II, Bimbó út 111

11th August 1933

My dear and respected Friend,

On returning home, I feel it my first pleasant duty to thank you for the kind hospitality which you and your honoured wife^[1] showed me at your home. The pleasure was made all the greater when I received the splendid collection of periodicals you sent, which provide an overview of your latest artistic and literary endeavours.

I shall find all of it extremely useful. I should say that I have been one of your most fervent admirers since childhood. As a writer and editor, I have found ways to bring your art into my humble works as often as the opportunity has arisen. In this regard, of course, my great handicap has been the circumstance of never having met you personally, in addition to the fact of having to fall back on well-worn sources as well as lucky chance when it came to following the international press.

Our recent meeting, and the thoughtful package you sent, now put me in quite a different position. I now feel empowered to write about you in a way quite different from hitherto. All this happiness will reach its culmination if we are regularly able to publish your London works in colour.

While I was in London we brought out a monochrome version (as far as I remember, I took it from the Ill. London News) of your portrait of little Princess Elizabeth [10531], because—as I have hinted above—as soon as we have been able to avail ourselves of publishable versions of your works, we have hastened to publish them. Having done this, however, in no way lessens our commitment to publishing the portrait in a version which involves a rotary press and three colour plates. What the Hungarian public now sees in monochrome, they will be happy to be able to see later in full colour.

With this letter, then, I am sending you the monochrome version, as well as four full sections of print to give you a sense of how our images are reproduced. We print 16 colour pages together at once,

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which explains why this type of printing, aimed at a very large circulation, can naturally not compete with technologies that make use of a hand press and painstaking manual labour to produce a single copy. In our case, all the labour goes into the pre-press stage.

I am also troubling you with these printed sections because if a photographer asks about size, for example, it is best to show him the pages in their uncut state.

Thank you once again for everything: both for my own sake and on behalf of Pesti Hírlap. With God’s help I may perhaps—as I said—get through to the middle of September, at which time, giving plenty of notice, of course, I will pay my respects to you and when my glass plates are ready, I will bring them.

Until then, I wish you and your honoured wife all the very best. May God grant you strength and energy for continued work—for the benefit and enjoyment of humankind.

Your long-time admirer and ever obedient servant,

Dr László Siklóssy

Budapest V. Pesti Hírlap

Editorial Note:

Doctor László Siklóssy de Pernesz (1881–1951), Hungarian art critic; for biographical notes, see [111404].

AH (translation)

12/12/2024

KB (summary)

13/10/2009