Culture and trade. An analysis of Eva Unander’s commercial lending library 1818-1829

This thesis has been written with the intention of investigating a commercial lending library to be found in Stockholm in the first decades of the nineteenth century. We chose this subject because it is a relatively unexplored area. Furthermore, we were curious to know what books could be found in the library. The lending library was run as a business thus giving a good indication of the contemporary reader's taste in literature. The lending library that we chose had a total of three thousand titles in those of its catalogues that have survived to the present day and was run by a woman called Eva Unander. We started by registering all the catalogued titles from our chosen library in the Royal Library's database SB17, which includes all printed matter between 1700-1829. The relevant information discovered was fed into a database, after which we have tried to make an interpretation and analyse the results of our interpretation from different standpoints. We discovered that many of the authors were anonymous, perhaps because writing novels was not held in high esteem. The library contained mostly fiction and the inflow of books in translation came mostly from Germany. Many of the named writers have no place in literary history today but have been forgotten. The laws regarding the freedom of the press of 1810-1812 gave people in the world of books far greater freedom. The library had many books in popular genres such as horror, piracy and family chronicles. We have also investigated the archives to find out about the person Eva Unander and follow her own personal history.Uppsatsnivå: