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What on Earth is Puntsi?Puntsi, or Kustannus-Puntsi, is the northernmost publishing house in the European Union. The headquarters of this family-owned company is situated in Inari in the Finnish Lapland. The publishing house specializes in Lapland, the Sámi (earlier "Lapps") and northern issues. The firm is so specialized in Arctic issues that all of its founders were born 300 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle - and only one of them in summer. Two of the founding members go regularly swimming in a hole in the ice in winter. The publishing house Puntsi was founded in 1996 to ensure that there would also be other type of literature published on Lapland and the Sámi than just exotic and very commercial literature. The publishing house has concentrated on high-quality nonfiction books, but it has also published fiction and for example books on hunting trips in the wilderness. Puntsi has cooperated with the Sámi Parliament in Finland, the University of Lapland, the Northern Photographic Center and Lapland's Provincial Library. The name of the publishing house, "Puntsi", comes from the Sámi word bunci which has a bunch of meanings, like "a tenon", "enthusiasm", and "to tinker". When a Sámi is no longer working at full capacity, we talk about his bunci dropping. At the publishing house Puntsi, everything runs at full capacity. In Sámi, a person or an enterprise that has a high opinion of him/itself, is a bunci. "Puntsi" has published its books mainly in Finnish, some of them with English summaries. Puntsi also sells a bilingual - Finnish and Sámi - CD-ROM on Sámi art. See Catalogue to find out all "Puntsi" published books. |
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