„Se Ramat Om …“
Open from 25 April 2025 to 27 July 2025.The books of Estonian peasants in the 19th century and the work of the Estonian National Museum (ERM) to establish a national central library.
When the Estonian National Museum was established in April 1909, its second important task after collecting antiquities was to establish a central library. The Estonian Students' Society, led by Oskar Kallas, had already begun compiling a complete library in Estonian and related to Estonians at the end of the 19th century. The Society’s library became the basis for the ERM Library, which was later renamed the Archival Library and began to fulfil the functions of the Estonian National Library.
In the early years of the museum, collection expeditions covering the entirety of Estonia started immediately, and in addition to ethnographic items, the goal was to collect as many old printed books as possible from the people in order to find all the books published in Estonian so far. Many of the volumes collected at the time were put on hold in the Archival Library Reserve Fund because they were defective or there were multiple copies. This exhibition is mainly based on them and focuses on the interesting inscriptions found in old books, which tell us the story of Estonians as book owners in the 18th-19th centuries: who they were, where they lived, how and where they got their books and what they thought about books.
You can take a look at some of the books that belonged to our ancestors at the exhibition to see if you can decipher the messages written in them.
With this exhibition, the Archival Library of the Literary Museum returns for a short time to its former home – the Estonian National Museum – with the books collected by the Estonian people.
The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Estonian Literary Museum.
Curator Ave Pill (Estonian Literary Museum)
Consultants Merika Kiipus and Helle Maaslieb (Estonian Literary Museum)
Technical support: Kaja Marga (Estonian Literary Museum)
Graphic designer Lauri Järvlepp (Bassein)
Producer Maris Klaas
