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36th ILAB Congress 6-11 September 2002 (Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo)
Hugh Pagan, 14 September 2003 - [ E-mail a Friend ]
[IMG:helsinki_foundation01.jpg] The biennial congresses organized for their members by the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers are among the most agreeable of the events in the antiquarian book trade calendar, and the 36th Congress, commencing in Helsinki on 6 September, and concluding with a farewell dinner on board the Pearl of Scandinavia ferry in transit between Oslo and Copenhagen on the night of 11/12 September, was no exception. For many of us it was the first time that we had set foot in any of the Scandinavian countries, and the combination of generous hospitality, new sights, warm weather, and calm seas made the week an unforgettable experience.
For the rank-and-file delegates who arrived in Helsinki on the afternoon of the 6th, the serious business of the Congress began with a welcoming dinner at the Hotel Scandic Marski in that city, striking a pleasing gastronomic pattern (salmon, steak, and a pudding accompanied by "arctic bramble" ice cream) which was to be emulated in successive Scandinavian capitals. Not quite so pleasing was an accompanying sparkling white wine evocatively described in Swedish as "Stucco Lustro skumvins coctail", which failed quite to convince our palates that it had been made from grapes (but it has to be recorded that this was the only obviously disappointing beverage among beverages of every character consumed during the following days).
On the following morning a selection of us walked in beautiful weather to Helsinki University Library, where we were shown one of its more unexpected treasures, a complete surviving private library of the Enlightenment period, formed by a German-born, Paris-educated intellectual who later held official posts at the court of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia and finally retired to a country house in Finland. It owes its survival in Helsinki to the fact that his prescient descendants removed it for safe-keeping at the University Library just before alterations during the Second World War to the Finland-Russia border which placed their estate on the Russian side of the frontier. From there we were taken by coach to the Mannerheim Museum, the former home of Field-Marshal Mannerheim, Finland's first President and a dominant figure in his country's history until the end of the Second World War. The house is maintained exactly as Mannerheim left it in the late 1940s, and after an exhaustive tour we left it under the temporary conviction that we would score highly in any future examination on the life and times of the late Field Marshal, a cavalry officer with looks and personality traits much akin to those of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. For the record, his library, safely kept in locked bookcases, seemed from a study of visible spines to contain only one older antiquarian book, a French language treatise on equitation, but among books of Mannerheim's own time there was what was evidently a remarkably fine bound set of the published works of the explorer Sven Hedin.
In the late afternoon we left by ferry for Stockholm, admiring from the ship as we left Helsinki's small historic waterfront and its rugged and well-defended harbour. The evening's ferry journey across the Baltic passed pleasurably enough, but those of us who retired to sleep in our ferry cabins, most of which had windows looking down on a charmless internal shopping mall, probably fared poorly by comparison with those braver spirits who stayed up into the early hours in the casino on the ship's topmost deck. All rose early on the morning of the 8th to get a sight of the archipelago of islands which the ferry was due to pass as it neared Stockholm, but these were shrouded in a thick sea mist and it was only in the last half hour before landing that the mist lifted and we enjoyed our promised views.
After checking in at the Scandic Hotel Anglais, for most of us our Stockholm base, we dispersed to visit those of the Stockholm antiquarian booksellers who had kindly agreed to Sunday opening in our honour, regrouping later in the day for a coach trip first to the Vasa Museum (housing the 17th century warship of that name, miraculously preserved almost intact and much more impressive when seen close to than in pictures in books), and then to the old aristocratic district centering on Stockholm's eighteenth-century Royal Palace. The day's proceedings concluded with a really excellent celebration dinner in the select premises of Stockholm's oldest and most prestigious gentlemen's club, followed by after-dinner drinks in the club's suite of rooms - and quality Cuban cigars for our delighted US colleagues.
The morning of Monday 9th found us on conducted tours of Stockholm University Library. For our group, these began promisingly with an electrifying emergence into rocky underground caverns strangely reminiscent of those in Indiana Jones films, but of which the floors turned out to be merely the roofs of the University's recently built book stacks. Special exhibitions of posters and printed ephemera laid out for our benefit were also tempting, and we listened with interest to presentations by various members of the library's staff, but the library authorities had clearly decided not to show us actual printed books, even in glass cases from a distance, and there was a general subsequent consensus that the library had not properly engaged with our primary field of interest (and it did not appear that anyone from their acquisition department visited our subsequent ILAB Book Fair in Copenhagen).
Lunch, or further visits to booksellers, occupied our remaining time in Stockholm, and in the afternoon we packed ourselves into a train to Oslo. It was even hotter on the train than it had been on our previous days in Scandinavia, and it was with great relief that the main body of delegates eventually arrived late that night over the welcoming threshold of the Grand Hotel in Oslo, much the pleasantest of those we were to stay in. Oslo proved indeed to be a real pleasure generally, and many of us managed to find books to buy there on the following day, particularly from Damms Antikvariat and during a lunchtime reception at Cappelens Antikvariat to launch their new gastronomy catalogue.
We had then to endure the formalities of the League's General Assembly meeting, held at Gamle Logen (Old Lodge) close to Oslo's mediaeval Akerhus Castle, but the meeting was not unendurably long, and it was indeed one of those truly successful meetings at which absolutely nothing memorable was said or done. An agreeable buffet dinner was served a little later in the same building, in a room surrounded by portraits of dead Norwegians so famous to their fellow countrymen that they carried no identifying labels, and with our Scandinavian Congress almost over, we began to tease out details of the hospitality that Melbourne will offer to the next ILAB Congress in 2004 : neither crocodile wrestling nor sheep shearing seem currently to be on the menu, but we are assured of the warmest of welcomes everywhere that we go, both in Australia and in New Zealand (where pre-Congress hospitality is promised), and there will be no better place for antiquarian booksellers the world over than Australasia in the first fortnight of October 2004.
One more beautiful morning in Oslo gave us time for a coach trip to three museum buildings outside the city, respectively housing two well-preserved Viking-age ships of the ninth century AD, Nansen's ship Fram, and a display relating to the life and achievements of Thor Heyerdahl. The simple grandeur of the Viking ships and of Nansen's Fram impressed us all, but the Kon-Tiki Museum, housing the Heyerdahl memorabilia, seemed poorly laid out and short of exciting exhibits, and to need something between a make-over and a complete rebuild. We were also shown part of an excellent open air museum of traditional Norwegian buildings, in which it would have been good to wander longer: but by then even we intrepid adventurers were hot, thirsty, footsore, and badly in need of lunch.
At 5pm on the same day we departed by ferry to Copenhagen on the final leg of our itinerary, and we proceeded majestically down the Oslo Fjord in the same marvellous weather that had accompanied us throughout. The Congress's traditional farewell dinner took place on board, culminating with an appropriate speech from our incoming President Bob Fleck (still looking spry after the unremitting ardours of ILAB committee meetings), and a few words from that loyalest of ILAB stalwarts, Keith Fletcher, in which he rashly confessed to having attended no fewer than 21 of our 36 congresses. Long may he continue to do so !