Finland 2025 book run

As print media continues its decline in retail and second-hand establishments I find once again on this return visit to Finland that a couple of my favourite stores have either closed down or downsized. Antikvariaatti Korkeavuori, where I always find at least one treasure amidst its chaos of knee-high stacks, had shuttered its doors. I walked down Korkeavuorenkatu from Eteläesplanadi and thought I had missed it, but then knew I couldn’t have by the time I got to Kapteeninkatu. A change in direction up the street proved that it had closed for good. Its windows were now papered over.

My favourite retail store, Akateeminen Kirjakauppa, continues to shrink. Its language section, in its own wing on the second floor, was now emptied and roped off. The language and travel sections were fractions of their formal selves. How I loved to spend hours in these two sections 25 years ago. It wasn’t even that long ago when I was still able to do this, as they were sizable departments when I regularly visited Finland in the early 2000’s. I pored over the maps, beautiful paper tablecloths of northern Finland and other European places. I discovered Faroe Islands and Bornholm travel guides during the summer of 2000 when I lived in Helsinki. Could I find such guides in English back home? No wonder I travelled to each place, respectively, in 2003 and 2004.

I only bought one book in Finland (second-hand), Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary by K. M. Elisabeth Murray at Arkadia International Bookshop. It was a precious find, since I had just finished reading The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. Elisabeth Murray is James Murray’s granddaughter and could provide some insight–as well as some heretofore unseen photos–that I had not read or seen before:

While at the home of Antti and Ilona Lehtinen I spent more time poring over their enormous book collection. I have been to their place three times and still haven’t seen all of their books, which are spread over numerous shelves in more than one room. While Mark and Antti had some time together Ilona and I walked through their collection and shared our favourites from the Finnish canon of classics. Ilona is a teacher and in her classes she gives a lesson on the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic containing poems and stories collected mainly from the eastern region of Karelia. She had two copies of Suomen Lasten Kalevala, which is a version of the epic for children. This version is illustrated, and the bonus is that she gave me her copy with her own handwritten notes. I feel so blessed that she would give me her own annotated edition:

The second book she gave me was a modern Finnish retelling of the novel Seitsemän veljestä by Aleksis Kivi. Juha Hurme used contemporary Finnish to tell the story which Kivi originally wrote in 1870. In my review of its translation Seven Brothers, I mentioned how hard it was to find translations of some of Kivi’s words when I read it side-by-side with the original. Many of my on-line searches for definitions were circular in that the only reference to the Kivi word I was looking for was the citation in Seitsemän veljestä itself. Kivi must have used neologisms or words that were so specific to a region from that time that no one was still using or would know what those words meant today. Hurme included a commentary at the end of the book: