This book studies the ”grey area” of the success story of rural lending libraries in the Nordic countries through the activities of people’s libraries in one area of Central Finland.

The study explores the influence of social, cultural, geographical and economic phenomena on the reading habits of the local population, and reveals interesting reasons why the establishment of elementary schools and popular libraries did not automatically increase the informational capital of the common people of remote regions.

The combination of collective biographical and transnational comparative methods with rarely utilized original sources is innovative and has not been used before in Finnish historical research on functional literacy and popular libraries.