Some books have two lives, and Edenheim's tribute to traditional Swedish style is one of them. This is its paperback release, published toward the end of the 1990s, and it keeps every one of the 128 illustrated pages intact: the painted rooms, the timber homes, the folk craft and the quiet domestic objects that the hardcover photographs so lovingly.
The difference is entirely physical, and entirely in its favour for a certain kind of reader. The lighter binding makes it the easy one to slip into a day bag and open on a bench between the cottages, rather than the heavier volume you leave waiting at home. Where the hardcover feels like an evening companion, this one feels like a walking one.
If you have read our story on the hardcover, everything we said about the content holds here: the broad sweep of buildings, the art historian's attention, the after-the-visit glow. We simply mention this edition separately because it has its own small place in the book's history — the affordable, portable form in which a great many readers first met it.
It is, in short, the people's edition of a quietly important book about Skansen. Light to hold, generous on the page, and easy to give away.