Saturday Essay Audiobooks have taken over the market, but the 130-year-old bookstore is still squeezing: By these means, Sastamala keeps the record alive

Let’s live the year 2022 AD. The audiobooks have taken over Finland … but not quite completely: a small village of invincible people from Kantaan Häme still holds against the conqueror.

thank you Asterixyou give perspective to our day.

The life against digital oppression continues in Tyrvää Fortress, in the center of which is Vammala Station. Both are also Sastamala, which may confuse the attacker’s plans to conquer.

The highways to Tampere, Hämeenlinna, Pori and Turku are far away. We studied here Piplian pages already in the era of waterways.

There is a stone-throwing in Kiikka, and there is a poet Kaarlo Sarkia was born 120 years ago. If the son, who had been motherless early, had pocket money, he would certainly carry it to Tyrvää Bookstore. It was founded ten years before his birth.

And that’s it is still there, on the current Marttilankatu, although dozens of expensive stone-foot shops in Finland have already collapsed in the flow of audiobooks, streaming services and all the online entertainment waiting one click away.

Sirkka-Liisa Leino has been in charge of the store for decades and sees no reason to quit.

With him, I descend from the street level to the most sacred of book sales: the Book Cellar.

From the 1970s onwards, mail-order catalogs knocked on a machine, duplicated on waste paper and sent to subscribers all over Finland were cases that literary devotees waited a long time for. I, too, a schoolboy in Helsinki, because the cellar in Tyrvää took only the quality from the remaining items of the publishing houses and sold them at a decisively cheaper price than the others.

Postage halved when you ordered together with the big sister with. Heinrich Böllin novel Woman in a group photo we even came to China when both claimed to have done so. I missed that, according to an entry I made on the cover in 1977. When I had to choose with little money, Sex Pistols’ newly released album Never Mind The Bollocks did not buy.

“Making and mailing lists was a hell of a job,” Sirkka-Liisa Leino recalls with a smile.

Especially for summer travelers, the Book Cellar continues to draw its attention. Quality readings, cheap, and also items that would otherwise only be found in antique stores in the condition left by previous owners.

The retailer makes the discoveries himself, not from the store side, but from warehouses that have accumulated what they have accumulated over the decades.

One of the works that got to the parade sites in the basement is Arto Paasilinnan written by and Raimo Sallinen illustrated Finnish passing games (WSOY, 2008). Here, too, the old book is new but the price is frozen in antiquity: 9.90 euros.

Trading focuses on summer, fall, and Christmas tree. This is how it is quiet in the oasis of Tyrvää’s hard decks in March.

Still upstairs, there is a front door to the fresh opus, stationery and board games section. The senior gentleman asks Armi Hohkon a local historical work Pikkupirtin Eevaand you also get it.

The local is also the publisher of the work, Warelia, whose showcase is on the same street a few houses away. So far, Warelia’s most nationally significant release is Marko A. Hautalan nearly 1,200-page biography Algoth. A rebellious penman. A. Untola’s strange life last year.

The name Warelia refers to a writer and priest born in Tyrvää in 1821 Antero Wareliuswhich helped significantly Elias Lönnrotia in the development of literary language.

Day jobs publisher Marko Vesterbacka makes the story of a Finnish book from the “incunabula to the e-book” in the museum in Pukstaavi, which is also located on the same Marttilankatu, as well as Mauri Kunnas the house of Mr. Hakkarainen, who draws on production.

When you can still find Antikvariaatti Tyrwa on the same stretch of street, the most exceptional two-hundred-meter-long one in literary Finland is full. By flanning it and stopping in the door, the magnifying advertisement of the small remote Sastamala begins to feel perfectly justified: “The Book Capital of Finland”.

The disappearance of the book Sirkka-Liisa Leino does not let go of a bad word from an audiobook at the skull of a fight against the skull, although she only listens to them when she cannot read: when hitting logs.

According to him, the audiobook will not take the market because people are mixed users. So the store still supports three employees.

The nationwide picture is certainly inconsolable. Tyrvää’s store is part of the Info chain, which twenty years ago had a total of another hundred stores, and now there are only 15. As the old retailers retire, no new successors can be found.

According to Leino, however, there are preconditions for the operation, as supermarkets only sell betsellers and are not guaranteed to make gift packages – with bows, as Leino’s team is always happy to do.

Is Marttilankatu 18 the last address of its kind in Finland in this respect?

The years of the corona in Tyrvää have been downright good. People appreciate intimacy and professional service. For example Paula Heinosen work Well-being for menopause (WSOY) would have sold even more last year, but a shortage of paper prevented new editions.

“Customers are the best,” Leino sums up his long career. “We just have nice and smart people. We talk about books and give each other something to read. ”

Thus, keeping a bookstore can also be called a way of life, and not the worst of it at all.

Still, the expectations of both Leino and the entire literary Sastamalank are already in the summer. The hottest phase of summer tourism traditionally coincides with the Old Literature Days at Sylvää School at the turn of June – July, which attracts traders, writers as well as the reading and buying crowd all over Finland.

Marttilankatu likes leaves, crosses the Vammaskoski bridge and drives a few kilometers on the opposite shore of Rautavesi to St. Olaf’s Church, inherited from the early 16th century. To what had just been restored as a result of long, diligent and demanding community work by the locals when it was destroyed by arson in August 1997.

Emotions in the locality were hot, and they were also followed in the kingdom media.

I am reminded of a reassuring, merciful statement by a local priest, reflecting the most precious spirit of Christianity in the secularist’s way, which went something like this: the life of the old stone churches is that they burn sometimes.

New the work contract was completed in 2000. Church paintings created Kuutti Lavonen and Osmo Rauhala. From experience, I can say that the silence about the spirit of Olavi and his partners calms the minds of the incomprehensible, cruel, and threatening war of our time. Yes, we will survive.

Admittedly, man does not live on a mere book.