Dear friend of Arkadia, You are most heartily invited to the launch of Arkadia Gazette, a new magazine founded by the bookshop, on Wednesday 8.2 from 9am to 9pm. 59 friends of the bookshop have generously contributed texts, articles, drawings, photographs etc. to its 136 pages. You must absolutely read it! We wish to extend special thanks to for their kindness and understanding to Simon Dannapfel, Ko Ko Thett, Gareth Griffiths, Jeremy Thorne, Petri Saarikko and Gordon F. Sander. Welcome all! Warm regards, Ian www.arkadiabookshop.fi – Green tea and more will be offered all day Dear Reader, Arkadia International Bookshop is embarking on a new adventure. When we first opened the doors and began trading in second hand books nearly four years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine the tremendous vitality that would sweep through the shop, and the journey we were beginning. We have sold books in numerous languages and every possible field of interest, and hosted over four hundred events that reflect the intriguing variety on the bookshelves. We have now founded a magazine that we hope in some way captures this emerging scene: Arkadia Gazette. Our starting point has been an acknowledgement of the prodigious capacity of our species for wonder, puzzlement, curiosity and imagination. It is the impulse to pose questions and endeavour to answer them, the desire to set minds moving off in new directions, the readiness to surrender long-cherished presuppositions if proved inadequate or simply dead-wrong, the craving for beauty and elegance, and simply the desire to learn from the quandaries facing humankind in science, politics, technology and other spheres of life. Our ambition is also to build the capacity to deliver a forceful critique of all forms of oppression and violence. We wish to affirm our responsibility towards each other beyond the narrow limits of nationality, ethnicity, religion, political dogma, and geography. We wish also to provide a good measure of resistance to all aspects of society that impoverish and demean us all and support, with steadfastness and humour, the ones that elevate us. All these considerations, we believe, have been openly displayed at the events we have hosted at the bookshop. Arkadia Gazette is eternally grateful to the generous contributors to this issue, all 59 of them. They have lit sure pathways, which will allow us to venture beyond our walls in Töölö in Helsinki. The Gazette also owes more than we can say to Pauliina Mäntyvaara and Sallamari Rantala who have played so large a part in all aspects of its creation. Let us carry on now and be cheerful and combative! Ian Bourgeot