The Hungarian Statistician Behind Three Volumes of Visualization Masterpieces
Revisiting the life and work of Lajos Illyefalvi (1881–1944), the great data chronicler of Budapest
The statistician Lajos Illyefalvi’s (1881–1944) graphic works are little known even for the Hungarian data visualization community. I want to commemorate his legacy here through three exemplary, and sadly unpaired, monumental, 500-page graphic-only volumes on Budapest, edited by Illyefalvi.
Lajos Illyefalvi was born in Lajtafalu (now Potzneusiedl, Burgenland, Austria) in 1881 as Lajos Imre Janisch to an Evangelist family. In 1907 he changed his name to Illyefalvi (sometimes written as Illyefalvy) and graduated from the Science University of Budapest (the predecessor of Eötvös Loránd Science University). In 1908 he joined the Budapest Capital Statistical Office and served as the director of the Office from 1926 until his retirement in 1943. From 1929 on, he was a member of the International Statistical Institute, and from 1936 he was appointed as correspondent member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His main research fields were urban population and economics, and he was a pioneer in Hungarian statistical research of women in society. He served as the editor of several journals, most notably he was the editor of Bulletin of Statistics until his retirement. He died at 63 in April 1944.
He wrote more than a dozen statistical books on economy, history, women and children, but here I will highlight only the three large graphic volumes of his oeuvre: A székesfőváros múltja és jelene grafikus ábrázolásban (Past and Present of the Capital in Graphic Presentation) published in 1933, Budapest székesfőváros áruforgalma (Trade Accounts of Budapest) from 1937, and A székesfőváros jelentősége hazánk anyagi és szellemi művelődésében (The Importance of the Capital City in our Country’s Material and Intellectual Culture) from 1940. These three tomes of well-crafted visualizations edited by Illyefalvi have been long forgotten by the wider public.
When the representative album Past and Present… came out in 1933 for the 60th anniversary of the merge of Buda, Pest, and Óbuda into Budapest, it was praised by professionals, critics (statisticians, engineers, architects, etc), and commentators recognizing its novelty, quality, the enormous graphic work invested in the presentation, and its politically neutral concept. Illyefalvi, and his associates, Lajos Bene, János Fitzner, and Gyula Nyemecz, used a large variety of chart types and cartograms on 200 pages of size 26x37cm. Illyefalvi writes in the preface that the aim of the album was not just popularizing statistics but to help the interest of the scientific research:
“The graphic presentation gives some new perspectives for professionals, statisticians and economists, clarifies correlations, relations which can’t be read out from the numbers.” p. II.
One laudatio in Magyar Hírlap said that “newspaper editors should learn from Illyefalvi,” another article in Népszava called the volume “splendidly executed European quality,” while the critic of the Városok Lapja exaggerated that “the volume outshines not only all the previous representative albums about Budapest but all the albums published by all statistical offices of all cities.” The statistician Miklós Móricz lamented on the uniqueness of the book in Budai Napló because there were not any similar publications in Hungary on the same level of quality. The only critical remark was written by Bauhaus architect Virgil Birbauer in the journal Tér és Forma recommending Neuraths’ Isotype-system for the graphic presentation.
“The technical execution of the graphics is perfect, (…) but let me argue that during the design, the drawing and the coloring, a more modern method should be followed. The pictogrammatic “Mengenbilder” system of the Wiener Gesellschaft and Wirtschaftsmuseum is more readable, more expressive, and for the [layman] is more moving. Their albums are graphic masterpieces, therefore more effectives than the Budapest-album. (…) In the future more spirit and creativity will be needed.” Virgil Birbauer — About two books. In: Tér és Forma Vol. VII. №8 1934, pp. 223, 225.
The idea of publishing large albums of statistical graphs naturally was not new at all, and historically, Illyefalvi’s work was late by 40 years after Émile Cheysson’s Album or Henry Gannett’s Statistical atlas. Past and Present wasn’t inventive, wasn’t progressive, and wasn’t original, but used a wide range of chart types professionally and perfectly. Some of the dashboard-like pages are really beautiful, and few graphic types were introduced first in these volumes for the Hungarian public. It was unique because it was the first representative album in Hungary which told about history, correlations and complexity using only the visual language of graphs, diagrams and thematic maps in exceptional quantity and quality.
Past and Present had no real predecessor in Hungary (2), and later had no followers, except the two other albums edited by Illyefalvi in 1937 and 1940. Both followed the first’s overall concept, except that draughtsmen re-introduced 3D perspective visualizations and maps. Illyefalvi argued in the Introduction that with a three-dimensional method they could show more complex correlations and comparisons. The method, particularly the “sliced cheese disc” type was cursed as “unfortunate,” again by Virgil Birbauer in his review about the last volume in 1941. While the first two volumes weren’t used for ethno-chauvinist propaganda, the last one was framed by commentators as factual and graphic evidence of the uniqueness of Hungary in the world. As a review in the right-wing, anti-semitic tabloid Esti Újság wrote about The Importance of the Capital City in our Country’s Material and Intellectual Culture:
“It creates the identity and the belief, that the capital of the Hungarian Empire (sic!) will have a big role, and with the boost of the nation’s economic and cultural power, we Hungarians can secure the leadership in the Carpathian basin amongst the other nations who live here.” In: Esti Újság 08/03/1941, p. 2.
While all the three volumes were critically acclaimed, they had little impact on others’ work. We can identify their design on illustrations in a few journal articles in the Bulletin of Statistics (also edited by Illyefalvi), but graphics and visualizations were quite rare in newspapers, magazines and journal papers, and most of them were in black and white. Publishing high quality, colored graphs was expensive, not surprisingly the three volumes were funded by public money and published for representative purposes. The last volumes’s graphic work lasted two years in drawing.
It’s quite hard to find good and complete copies at antiquaries, but they used to be offered at reasonable prices, around $70 USD. The three volumes were digitized and published limitedly in 2014 on DVD-format, but they are still not available on the Hungaricana/Arcanum digital archive.
After the final volume was published, there weren’t any similar ventures in Hungary. In the postwar communist era, Hungary published two great, high-quality national atlas (1967, 1989) containing only thematic cartograms, but no other types of visualizations.
Note:
- In the Introduction of the Past and Present… Illyefalvi writes that a few years earlier, engineer Albert Halász tried to write and publish a similar graphic album on Budapest but he did not succeed.
- We can consider here two other Hungarian works. The Economy and Culture of the Thousand Year Old Hungary and the Millennial Exhibition of 1896 edited by Sándor Matlekovits. The behemoth work (9 volumes, nearly 10.000 pages) published in 1897–98, had a large number of nicely crafted charts and thematic maps illustrating some articles on trade, mining, population, etc. The other is one of the first national atlas of Hungary, The Economies of Hungary in Maps by engineers Illés Aladár Edvi and Albert Halász. It was published in 1920 in three languages as the background work of the Trianon-treaty. The propagandistic album contained 70 pages of colored statistical maps and graphs.
