The books presented here include:
- Emma O’Kelly: Wild Sauna. Best outdoor saunas in Britain
- Glenn Auerbach: Sauna build. From start to finish.
- Katariina Kailo: Sauna culture, Sweat and Spirituality. On the Architectonics and Cosmology of Sacred Space.
- Katja Pantzar: Helsinki by Sauna
- Rosanna Cooney: Sweat house
Most of these books are available on most Amazon stores, but availability may depend on your region.
Emma O’Kelly: Wild Sauna. Best outdoor saunas in Britain
Aptly named, O’Kelly’s second book around sauna focuses tightly on the UK outdoor saunas. It does a great deal to describe and illustrate with beautiful photos on how quickly a new bathing culture has emerged all around. The majority of the listed 189 saunas are coastal, but several retreats on dry land are also introduced.
The book is served as a travel guide and as such can probably bring the desired inspiration to many aspiring sauna patrons. The hundreds of saunas nicely portrayed can also visual inspiration for future sauna entrepreneurs and builders.
Quite amazingly, the book also includes a general introduction to all things around sauna. In some fifty pages, she breezes through history, traditions, rituals, health benefits, and modern types of sauna across the world. Writing is impeccable and easy to follow, I believe owing thanks to authors’ professionalism and practice from her preceding book.
As this is not an actual review, I will only mention that at the speed of which many things are covered, there maybe some factual errors among the wealth of topics explained. I will only pinpoint a piece of misinformation that makes rounds constantly, referring to the 3.3 million saunas and 5.4 million people in Finland. There aren’t over three million saunas, but there are 5.6 million people in Finland according to our official statistics. Observe the truth, dear sauna authors!
As a guidebook, the tome takes a marketing stance with enticing images and appealing stories of customers and founders. This means the reader must find out the specific details (address, opening times, pricing, amenities) on their own from the internet. This has its sides, but I would have personally loved to see more details in print too as the book as a medium can store information much better than the internet.
Altogether great and comprehensive book, like a Lonely Planet of Wild British saunas that provides a joy of sauna even to a different continent through wonderful stories and attractive sauna photos.
Glenn Auerbach: Sauna build. From start to finish.
Available long only in a digital format, the author of SaunaTimes.com website, Glenn Auerbach finally created a printed version of the fourth edition of his sauna construction book. This book has been maturing over the years as the author has distributed digital versions of it.
Within over 200 pages, the book goes through the full construction process of a sauna cabin. The book deals with both wood-burning and electrically heated saunas, although wood-burning seems to take priority. Although the examples usually refer to cabins, many instructions are applicable to indoor saunas too. There are also about 30 pages on mobile saunas, which a unique aspect of the tome.
Book’s production quality is not quite to the best modern professional standards, telling a tale of its history, but layout and illustrations do a decent job in delivering the message. After all, I see the book as its best as a testament to Glenn’s decades long devotion to sauna craft which shows in a way book provides to many practical questions in a distinctive style.
The book seems like a good companion for American DIY builders with its very concrete product examples and application techniques. A distinctive feature of Glenn’s writing is humour, which might be appealing to readers who are not usually spending time between the pages, making the book stand out from what might call classical non-fiction writing.
See: https://www.saunatimes.com/build-your-own-sauna-ebook/
Endnote: this overview was solely based on the digital edition as my printed copy never found its way from Amazon.com to my desk on time (and the postal services from Finland to US are officially cancelled, dark times).
Katariina Kailo: Sauna culture, Sweat and Spirituality
The seasoned writer Dr. Kailo has numerous academic volumes in her biography. She has previously authored several books in Finnish that deal with sauna, its cultural history, spirituality, and significance in very non-technical means. Her latest book from Springer widens her treatment of the topic even further, embracing new and old dimensions with a deep philosophical lens. For example, book compares North European sauna and First North Americans’ sweat lodge culture, and also explores both Iberian and Irish histories of sweating. It covers topics such as “feminist spirituality” and native knowledge systems.
Kailo’s book offers serious food for thought for those interested in alternative writing of history, from a very specific perspective. The book is written is an academic style following traditions of continental philosophy and as such is not light reading. Its accessibility is further hindered by publisher’s pricing choice, putting it out of reach for all but most devoted readers. On the bright side, it certainly provides ideas and points of views not found in any other contemporary sauna book if the reader can stomach those.
Katja Pantzar: Helsinki by Sauna
Aptly named, this book is a simple guide to public saunas at the greater Helsinki region. As such, the value proposal is clear although not in my opinion quite enough for many tourists that commonly traverse the whole of Southern Finland sauna triangle (Helsinki – Tampere – Jyväskylä) in search of the best experiences. Given that the best known and most accessible saunas have been reported in many recent volumes, this feels like unnecessarily limited scope. For example, the O’Kelly book bravely covers much of the dense British Isles.
However, for those folks who are looking for a quick overview of what’s out there in the Helsinki area, this can come in handy. The production is professional quality. The only thing I find disagreeable is that the listings include several saunas that will be practically out of reach for normal tourists, including the cultural highlights which are mostly closed to public. The good part is that for the time being, this is the most up to date printed listing of public saunas in the region. For more timely information, visitors should see the digital guides.
Rosanna Cooney: Sweat house
Cooney’s book presents a delightful departure from many of the other books out there. Although it’s format presents no surprise, it makes a remarkable contribution to popularized cultural history by unearthing a previously poorly known late period of Irish sweathouses. Although it would have taken literally more digging to excavate the history in an academic, archaeological fashion, the story that the author has been able spin out of the what she discovers, is impressive. So, the book is worth looking into just for the merits of documenting the remains of Irish bathing history and today.
It is interesting compare her narrative to the one presented by other authors named so far, Kailo and O’Kelly, both of which tell their own story of the Irish history. Reading each of these in isolation provides very different, complementary perspectives, which I don’t have the capacity to analyze here, I only want to highlight the co-incidence of having these three accounts of the unique tradition and its sudden end come up in a short succession.
However, the book also holds few other tales as well as several tips laid out in a travel guide style. What I found the most interesting is the story her journey from Finland through the Baltics to discover the sauna and its variants in a personal way. That story is more personal, emphasizing her own uncertainties, vulnerability, and even gender. Colourful depictions of experiences and emotions are more interesting than just describing the same venues many authors and travellers have seen before and after. I find it particularly funny that she dares to critique several well-known sauna destination in the heartlands of sauna, and apparently for a very good reason!
I had the opportunity to meet Rosanna in London and, later on, also ask few questions after her book had already been published in late May. I was curious about how the book came into existence. The origin story included an element of chance, as they often do. Rosanna, a business journalist, was approached by a new a publisher to create a totally different type of a book, but she wanted to turn the publisher around to a more passionate topic. That topic ended up being sauna.
Initially Rosanne didn’t see the potential for a book of made about sauna, more like a magazine article, but after revelations of Irish sweath house history she got inspired to expand it. Then things moved fast.
The project began in January 2024 and concluded in 2025. Rosanna also collected the photos for the project during the research project. Some photos appear first time through a digital intermediate, they were digitized from the national archive.
After the book became publicly available, Rosanna has been delighted by its local reception.
“Many Irish people didn’t know about this history and had no democratic access to the information about the legacy. And now that we’ve got saunas, people love them and want to see them last. People are afraid saunas might go away!”
”For me, the response of the community is that book helps to legitimize the role of saunas in the contemporary society,” Rosanna explains. Besides defending the new culture of bathing, readers from UK have reached out, wanting to connect similarly with Scottish history (Orkney, Shetland) and investigate their history.