The National Library of Finland

This guide to the National Library of Finland in Helsinki begins with Matti Pohto, a man with no library degree and a record of arrests for having no fixed address, and traces his roughly three decades of walking farmhouse to farmhouse across the country. It sets that search against the 1827 fire in Turku that destroyed the university's library, some forty thousand volumes, and the building Carl Ludvig Engel raised in Helsinki to house what could be salvaged. Pohto could recall, from memory alone, the exact page where a chapter began in a book he had handled only once.