ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the latter group of independent Scandinavian socialist book cafes through an analysis of three different venues: two Swedish and one Danish. It analyses the book cafes as constituting parts of a counter public, in which a circulation of public knowledge, formulated and mediated within the New Left, was adapted within a Scandinavian context. Johan Ostling and David Larsson Heidenblad identify the book market as a system that, due to its intrinsic structure and general reach, has a certain relevance to the study of societal knowledge circulation. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Danish book market was still strictly regulated. Bookshops privileged by the publishers’ association gained a special position with respect to selling books from publishers that were under the rules set by the association, the so-called “bookshop monopoly”. The critique of an established “system”, politically as well as in terms of the media and book market, combined with a confident “can-do attitude”.
