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About Eva Unander
- Eva Unander, née Hjelmér (12 March 1774 - 1836) was a Swedish librarian.
- She was the second woman in Sweden to run a library, preceded by Cecilia Cleve, and the first to found and run a commercial lending library.
- Born in Arboga, she was the daughter of tailor Johan Hjelmér and his wife Brita.
- Her father died in 1777 at the age of 44, and her mother died six years later at age 43.
- Little is known about her childhood.
- In 1801, she married the bookbinder Abraham Fredric Unander in Stockholm.
- They had one son, Conrad Fredric.
- Abraham died in 1816, leaving Eva as a widow and single mother, with debts twice as much as the value of her estate.
- In 1818, she opened a lending library in Södermalmstorg.
- Initially, she ran advertisements in the daily newspaper Daglig Allehanda to attract patrons.
- She eventually stopped these advertisements, possibly because the library had become well-established.
- The patron could set the amount of time for the loan.
- The cost varied based on the number of books and the amount of time that they were borrowed, starting with four skillings to borrow a book for a day.
- Other books were also accepted as a form of collateral.
- The National Library of Sweden retains nine printed directories from Unander's library; a tenth directory may have existed and been lost.
- Eva Greek and Heléne Rova analyzed the languages and subject areas available in Unander's library catalogue, in order to analyze the reading tastes of the contemporary public.
- The library contained mostly fictional works, with many translated from other languages such as German.
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