György Rázsó was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1938. He was always fascinated by travel. In 1962 he graduated as a railway engineer. The free railway travel that came as a perk with his profession enabled him to travel across Europe at a time when trips to foreign countries in the Soviet occupied communist Hungary were a rarity.
It was in his travels that he acquired his first hotel labels. He immediately fell in love with them and became a collector. From that time on, he planned many of his vacations so that he could visit as many hotels as possible and collect their labels. His methodology was to first send his devoted and beautiful wife, Eva to the hotel receptionist to inquire about hotel labels, claiming that she was a collector herself. If she came back with labels, György returned to the reception desk after shift change to request more. This way he made sure that he maximized swap material for the collection. He usually returned home with hundreds of hotel labels.
While György’s collection did grow rapidly, it was a trip to Italy in 1967 that fast-tracked his efforts. He and his wife brought back from Italy an entire suitcase full of hotel labels. These labels became the foundation of György’s huge and remarkable hotel label collection, and enabled him to form relationships with several of the foremost collectors of the time and develop his collection through swap.
In the years and decades to come, György added many more labels by purchasing other collections, making his collection one of the most comprehensive hotel label compilations of all time with tens of thousands of individual hotel labels from all around the world.
After György’s death, his family decided to make his collection available to other collectors. In this first phase, we are selling the labels from his Italian collection, many of which were acquired early on in his 50-year-long label collecting career.