The staff at Corvina specializes in:

• print design & printing services
• web design & computer services
• specialty custom graphics for all occasions

In addition to English, we offer service in a variety of languages, notably Hungarian.

Corvina Printing & Design is named after the Corvina (Bibliotheca Corviniana), the great library of Mathias Corvinus, King of Hungary (1443-1490). Mathias commissioned the copying into richly illuminated and bound codices the written treasures of antiquity.

The library was located in the most beautiful wing of the Buda Castle, on the side overlooking the Danube. Of its two great interconnecting rooms one was given over to books of Latin origin, the other to those of Greek and Oriental works. The larger of the two rooms was also appointed and furnished as a workshop for the fostering and exchange of knowledge, where Mathias and the literati and humanist sages of the day met for discussion and debate.

Posterity has exaggerated the size of the library's holdings: some estimates have placed it as high as 50,000 volumes; recent scholarship estimates it between 200 and 2,500 volumes which, however, represent a substantially larger number of works. The Corvina's fame rested as much on the quantity as on the quality and range of the works represented (in keeping with the illustrious libraries of the day, Mathias aspired to a collection of all the known great works, with emphasis on those of classical antiquity). Hungary's most significant collection of humanist literature, it was in its own day already recognized and admired throughout Europe: no library North of the Alps and, even in Italy only the Vatican, could boast anything comparable.

After Mathias' death, the Corvina was left to stagnate, and its holdings were eventually dispersed, many finding their way into foreign libraries across Europe. The bulk of what remained in Buda was carried off, after the taking of Buda Castle by the Ottoman Turks in 1541, to Constantinople, where it was destroyed or disappeared over the centuries. Today, there are 168 known codices remaining, 43 in Hungary, the rest scattered in 44 libraries in 14 countries.