Vagabond Matti Pohto, Drifter Who Loved Books, Saves Finland Heritage
Great Fire of Turku (Finland)-1827
The 40,000 volume collection of the Imperial Academy of Turku (now Finland) burned in 1827 in the Great Fire of Turku.1 The academy's library had grown through gifts and purchases until 1707, when it received the right to legal deposit copies of books published in the Kingdom of Sweden-Finland. All printers in Sweden were obliged to send one copy of every publication to the universities, and thus also to the Academy of Turku. A catalog from 1755 shows the holdings of the library to have been 4,000 volumes.
After Henrik Gabriel Porthan became librarian in 1772, the library made great strides. By Porthan's death in 1804 the number of volumes had expanded to 30,000. 2
“It was on Tuesday, the 23d of August (4th of September), at nine o’clock in the evening, that the dreadful fire broke out at Abo, in the house of Mr Hellman.” These words, copied from the St. Petersburg Journal, were printed by The Times in London on 30 October 1827. The city of Turku in Finland, known also as Åbo in Swedish, had been almost completely destroyed in the devastating conflagration that started on 4 September 1827. 3
Helsinki University Library's current collection of Finnish books published before the Great Fire of Turku in 1827 is largely the result of the effort of Matti Pohto (1817–1857). Pohto was a farmer's son from Ostrobothnia, whose rough life included repeated arrests for vagrancy. In spite of his lack of formal education, during his thirty years of wanderings Pohto acquired a phenomenal knowledge of Finnish books; he could recite from memory on which pages and on which lines the chapters of a book started and finished. ...Among the 5,000 books that Pohto collected were all 489 volumes that had been stolen from the Royal Academy Library.4 A brief animated film tells the story of the forgotten hero, Matti Pohto the poor drifter, who collected 5000 books. His life work helped enormously in the gathering of the Finnish national book collection, which was destroyed in the Great Fire..5 See Matti Pohto-Drifter Who Loved Books.6
Hannu Salmi: Catastrophe, Emotions and Guilt - The Great Fire of Turku 1827. Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648–1920 . Eds. Deborah Simonton & Hannu Salmi. Routledge, New York 2017, 121–138.
Gordan, Lucy Latané. 1990. “Helsinki University Library: Reborn from Its Own Ashes.” Wilson Library Bulletin 64 (January): 59–61.
Ibid., Gordan.
Kannila, H. (1969). “Juho Pynninen and Matti Pohto: Two Distinctive Representatives of Finnish Library History.” Scandinavian Public Library Quarterly 2 (2): 111–16.
Hanneriina Moisseinen (2017). Matti Pohto-Drifter Who Loved Books. (4 min. animation).
I never knew that piece of history. It occurs to me that today we are going through a virtual fire, where books are not burned, but are prevented from being written preemptively. The suppression of free speech underway in the US and Canada is a peculiar form of conflagration.