The present anthology offers nine articles that deal with the book history of the Swedish Empire in the early modern period. During this period, i. H. since the end of the Kalmar Union, the Swedish territory mainly comprised the Swedish and Finnish territories on both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia. This is reflected in the anthology in the fact that a third of the articles deal with book history in the Finnish part of the Empire. The term book history is relatively broad and interdisciplinary. The editors were not only interested in the book as an object per se or descriptive descriptions of collections, purely numerical quantifications of preserved objects or the compilation of bibliographical information. Rather, a more open definition of the term “book history” also includes an in-depth study of individual types of text as well as the contents and discourses negotiated there. For this reason, some contributions are expressly dedicated to different types of text, including the history of the Swedish hymn book in the 16th century, the Swedish school drama of the early modern period or neo-Latin poetry