Árpád Plesch

Árpád Plesch (1889–1974) was a Hungarian financier,[1] banker, and lawyer. He owned a celebrated collection of rare botanical books and esoteric pornography. His botanical collection has been included in Douglas Cooper's Great Private Collections.

The native form of this personal name is Plesch Árpád. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Plesch was mentor[2] to the owner of the largest fortune in Italy, Gianni Agnelli, the president of Fiat.

He married three times,[3] to:

  1. Léonie Caro Ulam
  2. Marysia Ulam Krauss Harcourt-Smith, daughter of the previous
  3. Contessa Maria von Wurmbrand-Stuppach, called Etti Plesch, his last wife and sole heir to his immense fortune.

Léonie Ulam was the aunt of the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam.[4] In his memoire, Adventures of a mathematician, Ulam wrote:

'My uncle Michael's wife happened to live in Paris at the time and she kindly offered to receive me and to send to my modest hotel her chauffered limousine to take me sightseeing. I was so embarrassed at the thought of being seen arriving in a Rolls-Royce or a Duesenberg at the Louvre or some other museum, it felt so incongruous, that I declined her offer'

The Plesches lived between their apartment on the Avenue Foch in Paris and their Villa Leonina at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, in the South of France (where they built the superb Leonina botanical garden).

Plesch died in 1974 in Paris.

Publications
  • Botanique , 1954
  • Essais d'acclimatation de plantes tropicales en France, 1962
  • Mille et un livres botaniques de la collection Arpad Plesch, 1973

Notes
  1. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/may/29/schools.newschools
  2. http://www.edubourse.com/biographie/arpad-busson.php
  3. "Uma Thurman No Help to Arpad Busson in Madoff Fraud's Nightmare". Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 2010-12-03.
  4. "The Plesch Family Saga". Archived from the original on 2015-04-02.
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