Saturday 17 October 2009

The electronic antiquariat

An increasing number of out-of-copyright editions of Nordic classics are now being scanned from the collections of U.S. university libraries and uploaded to the Internet Archive. Recently I've been looking at the 1901 edition of Arvid Mörne's Nya sånger and the 1903 edition of Ny Tid, both from Harvard University Library. I also found it interesting to finally read Mikael Lybeck's plays about Finnish fortune-seekers and European industrial magnates in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, Dynastien Peterberg (The Peterberg Dynasty) and Den röde André (Red André). But if one looks further, both in the Archive and in Project Runeberg, there is now a very large amount of similar scanned material by Nordic authors available online, ranging from the works of Strindberg and Ibsen to much less well known names.

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