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Re-inventing the book: on the papernet, pod and the unbook

20 May 2009 | Articles, Non-fiction

Mind-map: using the papernet to produce books just for you. Photo: Brian Suda

Mind-map: using the papernet to produce books just for you. - Photo: Brian Suda

Just as Books from Finland finally goes online, the brightest minds of the internet are forecasting a return to paper. In the first of a series of articles, the poet and scholar Teemu Manninen celebrates the second coming of the book

Last week I did something I’ve never done before. I uploaded the manuscript of my third book on to the website Books on Demand, an internet print-on-demand (‘pod’) service, chose the format (a large 19×22 cm size with a hard cover), selected a picture for my cover, copy-pasted a poem by Clark Ashton Smith – an American science fiction and fantasy writer – on the back flap and ordered a copy. More…

Hip hip hurray!

13 June 2014 | This 'n' that

Tove Jansson, 1956. Photo: @Moomin Characters

Tove Jansson, 1956. Photo: @Moomin Characters™

The English author of bestselling children’s fantasy books Philip Pullman – of His Dark Materials fame – declares himself a devoted fan of Tove Jansson, the Finnish Moomin-creator and artist, whose stories and novels have been translated into 44 languages.

Pullman has been a fan since the age of eight – now, reassessing Jansson’s work, he notes ‘the perfection of the drawings’. Jansson illustrated her Moomin books, in black-and-white mostly.

Pullman reviews two books in Books for Keeps, the British online children’s book magazine: the newly translated biography of Tove Jansson (1914–2001) by the Swedish scholar Boel Westin (Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, Sort of Books, 2014) and Tove Jansson’s memoir from her childhood, Sculptor’s Daughter. ‘Jansson responded to the world with a freshness and originality that have hardly ever been matched in the field of children’s books,’ he writes.

The artist, painter, writer Tove Jansson was born on 9 August – almost a hundred years ago. A major centenary exhibition of her work at the Finnish National Gallery Ateneum is open until 7 September.

Pullman concludes: ‘she could convey all the excitement of wonder as well as the reassurance of comfort and familial love – and [–] evoke a mood of apprehension, loss and mystery. She should have had the Nobel Prize.’

Three cheers – we at Books from Finland agree!

New from the archives

5 February 2015 | This 'n' that

Eeva Kilpi

Eeva Kilpi. Kuva: Veikko Somerpuro

When we first published this piece, evacuation in Europe was a distant memory. The violent events that were to take place in what was then still Yugoslavia – Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Kosovo – were still to come.

Reading Kilpi’s description of her departure from eastern Karelia as an 11-year-old girl in 1939 with these more recent events in mind makes her evocation of the as-yet-unshattered familiarity of everyday life, the fragility of her prayers that everything will be all right, all the more poignant.

Kilpi (born 1927) is a poet, short-story writer and novelist who shot to international fame with her experimental, erotic novel Tamara (1972; English translation Tamara). She won the Runeberg Prize in 1990 for Talvisodan aika (‘The time of the winter war’), from which this extract is taken.

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The digitisation of Books from Finland continues apace, with a total of 355 articles and book extracts made available online so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Time to go

29 June 2015 | Greetings

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Animation: Joonas Väänänen

We’ve often thought of editing Books from Finland as being a bit like throwing a party.

It’s our job to find a place to hold it, send out the invitations and provide the food and drink.

It’s your job to show up and enjoy.

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Books from Finland is a party that’s been running since 1967 – for nearly fifty years.

In that time, we’ve served up almost 10,000 printed pages and 1,500 posts, a wide-ranging menu of the best Finnish fiction, non-fiction, plays and drama, accompanied by essays, articles, interviews and reviews.

We’ve had a ball, and to judge by the letters and emails we’ve received from many of you, you’ve had a good time too.

But now it’s time to go: the landlord, to stretch the metaphor, has called in the lease on our party venue. Faced with funding cuts in the budget of FILI – the Finnish Literature Exchange, which has since 2003 been Books from Finland’s home – the Finnish Literature Society has decided to cease publication of Books from Finland with effect 1 July 2015. Our archive will remain online at this address, and the digitisation project will continue. We won’t be adding any new material, though; this is, literally, the last post.

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The party may be over, the lights and music turned off – but what about the partygoers?

They are doing what partygoers always do: they – we – are moving on.

Readers and writers, photographers and illustrators, everyone who’s helped, supported and enjoyed Books from Finland, thank you!

So long. See you around.

Hildi Hawkins & Leena Lahti

Leave a comment

What do YOU think?

8 April 2011 | This 'n' that

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Dear Reader:

we would love to know what you think about Books from Finland and what it means to you.

You can of course always send us suggestions and comments – interactivity is one of the great bonuses of being online – but we’d like to ask you some specific questions so that we can build up a picture of who reads our website, as well as your likes and dislikes.

We’ll start now, posting a question each month – see the sidebar on our main page. Please participate!

The Editors

New from the archive

26 March 2015 | This 'n' that

This week’s pick is a comic short story by Martti Joenpolvi about the gender divide

Martti Joenpolvi

Martti Joenpolvi.
Photo: Janne Aaltonen.

We first published this short story by Martti Joenpolvi, an acknowledged master of the genre, in 1989; it comes from the collection Pronssikausi (‘The bronze age’, 1988), which was nominated for the Finlandia Prize.

The subject – the story is about a man taking his mistress on a secret visit to his summer-house – provides plenty of opportunity for sly humour. But it’s a more unsettling read in 2015 than we’re guessing it was twenty-five years ago – not so much for the plot itself, which makes ironic fun of the idea of woman-as-chattel, as for the characterisation, which subtly places the woman exactly where the story does.

Enjoy!

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The digitisation of Books from Finland continues, with a total of 375 articles and book extracts made available online so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

New from the archives

13 February 2015 | This 'n' that

Daniel Katz

Daniel Katz. Photo: Veikko Somerpuro/WSOY.

In the midst of today’s richly cosmopolitan literary scene – we’re thinking of blockbusters like Sofi Oksanen’s Puhdistus (Purge, 2008), or Patjim Statovci’s Kissani Jugoslavia (‘My cat Yugoslavia’, 2014) (linkit) – it’s hard to imagine the colour and excitement represented by the work of Daniel Katz (born 1938) from the publication of his first book, Kun isoisä Suomeen hiihti (‘When grandfather skied to Finland’, 1969) onward. Characterised by dark humour, gentle irony, a wild imagination and a profound world view, Katz’s writing is informed but never defined by his outsider status as a Jew writing in Finnish.

Today’s story, taken from Katz’s book Talo Sleesiassa (‘A house in Silesia’) describes the journey taken by Erwin, a German Jew, to visit the home he lived in before the Second World War. Katz has a fine grasp of the ironies of history:

‘We arrived at the city of his birth, which currently is referred to as The City, for the sake of simplicity and tact: the town has – used to have, rather – two names, a German and a Polish, and one or the other party might take offence. My brother-in-law had in fact been born in a city whose name began with a B, though now it began with a W. Evolution of this kind is called phonetic history.’

The extract is accompanied by an interview of Daniel Katz by Daniel Katz.

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The digitisation of Books from Finland continues apace, with a total of 356 articles and book extracts made available online so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

The pirate’s friend

11 March 2011 | Articles, Non-fiction

Intellectual property was hot stuff half a millennium ago, and not much has changed: Teemu Manninen takes a look at piracy and mercenaries in the age of electronic books

Sir Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke (1554–1628) by Edmund Lodge. Photo: Wikimedia

In November 1586 Fulke Greville (later 1st Baron Brooke) sent Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham a letter complaining about some ‘mercenary printers’‘ plans to print the romance novel Arcadia written by his friend (and Walsingham’s son-in-law) Sir Philip Sidney, who had died that very same year. This ‘mercenary book’ needed to be ‘stayed’, i.e. censored by the authorities, so that Sidney’s friends and relatives might take control, and also because publishing his works without consulting Greville or someone close to Sidney might damage his reputation or even his ‘religious honors’.

I rehearse this ancient tale because of its exemplary value for us today. From our point of view there seems nothing extraordinary about Greville’s actions: he is seeking to defend his friend’s literary estate from ‘mercenaries’ who steal intellectual property (IP): pirates. More…

At the Fluctuating Reality Club

30 March 2007 | Authors, Reviews

Leena Krohn. Photo: Mikael Böök / Teos

Leena Krohn. Photo: Mikael Böök / Teos

For Leena Krohn, compromise doesn’t seem to be an option. Although the novel Mehiläispaviljonki (‘The bee pavilion. A story about swarms’, Teos, 2006) is her 26th book, her uncompromising approach doesn’t show the slightest sign of relaxing.

Once again, Krohn (born 1947) spreads before the reader an array of fragments of reported realities, which crisscross the boundaries of imagination and challenge the whole traditional conception of the world.

Since the short-story collection Donna Quijote ja muita kaupunkilaisia (1983; English translation: Dona Quixote and Other Citizens, 1995), Krohn has moved more towards the role of thinker and polemicist than ordinary storyteller. In her work in the 1980s and 1990s, she developed a unique, highly personal hybrid literary form, which combines the elements of fiction and essay. Krohn’s attention has focussed on human consciousness, ecology and moral and social questions. Her work has been translated into 12 languages; she received the Finlandia Prize for Literature for her work Matemaattisia olioita tai jaettuja unia (‘Mathematical beings or shared dreams’, 1992). More…

New from the archive

17 March 2015 | This 'n' that

Gösta Ågren

Gösta Ågren. Photo: Studio Paschinsky

Back in the day, in one of our periodic excursions into merchandising – the main criteria were that our goods should be flat (to fit into an envelope) and, of course, literary – we printed Books from Finland t-shirts. They were wildly popular – we must have sold, oh, dozens of them – and top of the list was a shirt with a laconic couplet by Gösta Ågren: ‘Don’t worry / it will never work out.’

Writing in Swedish and hailing from a small village in Ostrobothnia, in the far north-west of Finland, Ågren (born 1936) is the author of poems, essays and biographies. He may often choose to adopt the persona of a country curmudgeon, but the laconic tone of his poems belies a tenderness, a universalism, and an underlying political commitment, that speaks of a love of the world, a desire to make it into a better place.

The volume from which these poems are taken, Jär (‘Here’, 1989), won the Finlandia Prize for Literature in 1989.

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The digitisation of Books from Finland continues, with a total of 372 articles and book extracts made available online so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.