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The Closed Stacks Department of the National Széchényi Library (OSZK) was established in 1946. Everything that was not permitted by the censors and could not be part of the public collection of the library was put here. The librarians argued that the task of the national library was to collect every type of publication regardless of its content. The books and journals which were published by Hungarians who fled the country after the Revolution of 1956 added to the number of items. The department became a meeting point for members of the emerging opposition in the 1980s, which created an opportunity to get actual samizdat writings.

The samizdat holdings in the Vera & Donald Blinken Open Society Archives is a unique collection of illegal publications of the Hungarian oppositional intellectual circles. Though censorship was milder in Hungary than it was in the other countries of the Eastern Bloc, it would not have been possible for these volumes to have been published in socialist Hungary without independent publishers in the secondary public sphere, or “islands of the free press.”

The Saulė Kisarauskienė collection contains documents relating to the life and work of the Lithuanian painter Saulė Kisarauskienė, her family, and her husband, the famous artist and nonconformist painter Vincas Kisarauskas. She is a well-known representative of the Lithuanian school of exlibris, and the collection contains originals of her works. During Soviet times, Saulė Kisarauskienė adhered to the principles of her creative vision and free thinking, and was marginalised for this in the 1960s by the Soviet regime.