Árpád Plesch

Árpád Plesch (1889-1974) was an international Jewish financier, Banker and Hungarian 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.

Plesch was mentor to the owner of the largest fortune in Italy, Giovanni Agnelli (1866-1945), the president of Fiat.

He married three times, to :

Marysia Ulam was the aunt of the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. 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.

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