This thesis has been written with the intention of investigating a commercial lending library to be found in Stockholm in the first decades of the nineteenth century. We chose this subject because it is a relatively unexplored area. Furthermore, we were curious to know what books could be found in the library. The lending library was run as a business thus giving a good indication of the contemporary reader's taste in literature. The lending library that we chose had a total of three thousand titles in those of its catalogues that have survived to the present day and was run by a woman called Eva Unander.