Reading Societies in FinlandIlkka Mäkinen
Public libraries in Finland celebrate their bicentennial in 1994. The founding meeting of the Vaasa Reading Society in the Province of Ostrobothnia on the west coast of Finland took place on the 2nd of August 1794. Although the Reading Society was originally meant for its members or partners, other people were also allowed to borrow books for payment. The Reading Society in Vaasa was thus both a "proprietary" and "subscription" library (for the terminology, see J. Shera; Foundations of Public Libraries, l965, p. 68).
It is a rather new idea to consider the Vaasa Reading Society to be the beginning of public libraries in Finland. It is usually thought that libraries which provided reading for the Finnish-speaking less-educated majority were the predecessors of public libraries in Finland. However, reading societies at the end of the 18th and beginning of the l9th centuries, which were an undertaking of the Swedish-speaking educated classes, were actually the first "public" libraries in Finland.The first of the Finnish-language libraries was established in 1802, though it was not until the 1840's that the number of these libraries expanded. The language dispute between Swedish and Finnish was not, however, topical at this time, so that the subscription library in Vaasa can be considered a public library within the limitations of the time. In addition, it and other later reading societies were more like modern public libraries with respect to their structure and services than were the early parish libraries. A continuous line through history is. however, found only in parish libraries.
The main purpose of this article is to describe a variant of the reading societies prior to the Vaasa Society. This variant was called in Swedish "Bok Societet" (Book Society) and was active in Southern Ostrobothnia in the beginning of the 1760's. To provide a historical perspective on the book society, the article first reviews the development of reading societies in Finland and other countries. Finland followed international trends some decades behind Germany, England and America but simultaneously with its mother country, Sweden.
Reading societies had their origin in subscription circles or joint subscriptions to newspapers and periodicals (for the terminology, see M. Prüsener's doctoral thesis). They certainly existed also in Finland but were informal with no documentation during the l8th century. A step toward a more organised form arose in what were referred to as book clubs (in German: Lesezirkel), where each member bought a book in turn with pooled money. After having read the book, it was either auctioned or kept by the buyer. The "Bok Societet'' in Southern Ostrobothnia was this kind of a book club, even an early one from the Scandinavian point of view. This book club seemed to be the only one of its kind in Finland except for the one in Viipuri (south-eastern Finland) in the 1780's, which was strongly influenced by German-speaking culture.
Little by little, book clubs acquired a place to keep the books, first a bookcase and later on even a whole room. This was the next phase, the subscription library (in German: Lesebibliothek). The Vaasa subscription library (1794) was the first of its kind in Finland, and later on, these types of libraries were established in at least a dozen of communities, mostly in the coastal cities from Viipuri in the south-east to Tornio in the north-west, with a few found in inland areas, and even one in the rural municipality of Leppävirta in eastern Finland. In many of these cities, especially in Ostrobothnia, the subscription libraries developed into permanent institutions resembling modern municipal libraries. Subscription libraries were still very active under Russian rule up to the 1830's when censorship was tightened and book shops became more common, decreasing the need for libraries.
On the European continent reading societies developed into more sophisticated forms. A society with a whole apartment including a reading room, library, drawing room, restaurant, etc. came to be called a reading cabinet (in French: cabinet de lecture). In 1798, one like this - though very modest - was established in Turku, on the southern coast. The latter, called in Swedish "Akademisk leseförening" or the Academic Reading Association, was specifically meant for university teachers and students. Professional reading societies (in German: Fachlesegesellschaft) came to Finland during the first half of the 19th century.The first ones were for physicians, clergymen and military officers. Organisations like these were also used for popular education, and many early popular library projects resembled these.
The latter part of the article describes in more detail the activities of the Southern Ostrobothnian book club or "Bok Societet". Documentation has been found from three different sources. The first one is a posthumous list of books owned by a member of the club but has not been found yet. The second source is a handwritten, unfinished obituary for Erik Tulindberg, a land surveyor and a member of the club. A footnote in this obituary mentions that "some clergymen and gentlefolk have established a what they call a book club ("Bok societet") in parishes around Vaasa, whose members not only send books and writings of some value to each other, but also acquire new books, which are then circulated in the club from member to member for reading. History, geography, travel books, economics, the political and natural sciences are the disciplines collected by the club. Tulindberg and some of his colleagues were also willingly admitted to the club because they already had book collections which suited the taste and purpose of the club". The third source is so far the only book of the club that has been found. It is a Swedish translation of a book on Roman history by Montesquieu. On the fly-leaf, there are notes by the members of the club in the circulating order. They were 12 members in all: half of them were land surveyors, a third clergymen, one sheep farming counsellor and one noble military officer. They all lived in the countryside, east and south of Vaasa. Although many of the members lived close to each other, the books sometimes had to wander dozens of miles to reach the next reader.
The members of the book club were active men dedicated to the idea of enlightenment. Land surveyors, who had all been born in Sweden and moved to Finland as adults, represented the increasing civil servant intelligentsia of the country. Southern Ostrobothnia was one of the first areas in Sweden affected by what is referred to in Finnish history as "the Great Partition of Land". At least two of the clergymen of the club, Israel Reinius and Johan Aejmeleus, are known as promoters of popular education and economic growth. The noble member of the club, captain H.J. Roos, was the chairman of the economic deputation from Ostrobothnia at the Diet of Estates. J.D. Cneiff, the sheep farming counsellor, also spread enlightenment through his work. Erik Tulindberg had a son by the same name, who became the first composer in Finland and a senior administrator. The grandson of another land surveyor, L.A. Runeberg, became the national poet of Finland, J.L. Runeberg. It can thus be seen that the book club members and their descendants had a significant impact on Finnish cultural life.
Ostrobothnia has always been a special province with good connections to the centre of the realm - Sweden - and even abroad. The inhabitants were undoubtedly familiar with the reading society tradition in other countries: Captain H.J. Roos, for example, had served 1757-59 in the then Swedish Pommern (now Germany), where some of the earliest reading societies had been founded. The book by Pehr Kalm on his travels in America, in which the Franklin Library in Philadelphia was described, had been published in 1756. Thus, the stimuli for establishing such a reading society were many and diverse.
In Ostrobothnia, the idea of reading societies was not confined solely to the Swedish-speaking educated classes but was also adopted by Finnish-speaking peasants in their own way. Among the Finnish-speakers, a religious sect was founded in the latter part of the 18th century referred to later as "The Ostrobothnian Mystics" The members of the sect translated religious as well as secular books from Swedish and other languages into Finnish. which were then circulated as manuscripts from house to house. The Ostrobothnian book club. the "Mystics" and the Vaasa Reading Society reflect in a remarkable way the Western civilisation and culture of the Enlightenment in a geographically peripheral Finland.
Translated by Liisa Salmi