Jaguar [antikvár]

I discharge an ancient debt as, after much procrastination, I finally tell the true story of the newspaper called the Krajcáros Igazság. This paper, once much talked about and now irretrievably a thing of the past, shone with blinding light in the heaven of youthful Hungarian journalism some twenty-odd years ago. At the time journalism in Hungary was beginning that powerful upward surge the fruits of which the gentle reader (not, perhaps, rightfully so described) enjoys to this day. New papers - fresh, lively -were being born at that time, which, for longer or briefer periods, eclipsed the prestige of the settled, sedimentary, sedentary old papers. We who are now middle-aged established writers were then featherbrained young journalists, passionate reporters, speed-poets, court correspondents, summertime critics, pseudo-humourists, foreign politicians and, without exception, in love, always in love. If the specimen preserved in the news-sheet section of the National Museum is to be believed, the Krajcáros Igazság (anglice, perhaps, The Penny Truth) was launched upon its brief but none the less triumphant career in the early days of March 1891. The paper's owner was old Salamon Herskovits, who, to the outside world, called himself 'First Hungarian National General Newspaper-pub-lishing Company' for short. In the editorial office his title was, with a trifling exaggeration, 'His Honour', because a misguided government had once, on account of some mysterious virtues, not here to be listed, appointed him a Royal Councillor. Among ourselves, however, we preferred to call him 'Old General'. He wasn't keen on paying