Credits and Colophon: Sources, People, and Typefaces

A reference library runs on other people’s work. This page names that work: the Finnish institutions every guide is checked against, the researchers behind the health pages, the writers whose books and notes shortened the road — and, at the bottom, what the site itself is made of.

Which Finnish institutions is this library checked against?

Three carry most of the load, in a fixed order of authority.

Institution	What it settles here	Language
UNESCO — Sauna culture in Finland, inscribed 2020 (file 01596)	Heritage claims, and the working definition of löyly — the steam thrown onto hot stones	English
Suomen Saunaseura, the Finnish Sauna Society	Practice, etiquette, fire safety, children, the birch-whisk quality standard	English and Finnish
Kotus, the Institute for the Languages of Finland	Vocabulary and etymology, including where Finland says vasta and where it says vihta — and how blurry that line actually is	Finnish

The UNESCO file is also why one phrase gets handled carefully here. Sauna culture sits on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, which is a different thing from the World Heritage list and does not describe a place. It describes a living practice. That same file supplies the best short definition of löyly in English — “the spirit or steam released by casting water onto a stack of heated stones” — and the wording is borrowed on purpose.

Where a Finnish-language source is the better one, it is cited in Finnish and labelled. How those sources rank against each other, and why health claims are handled under a separate standard, is set out in the editorial policy.

Who are the researchers behind the health pages?

Mostly one Finnish research group, named on every page that uses it.

Jari Laukkanen and colleagues have followed the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease cohort — 2,315 middle-aged Finnish men — for a median of 20.7 years. In their 2015 paper in JAMA Internal Medicine, men who bathed four to seven times a week showed an adjusted hazard ratio for sudden cardiac death of 0.37 against once-a-week bathers, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.18 to 0.75. One observational cohort, all men, one research group. An association, not proof — the authors say so themselves.

The attribution matters because most sauna health claims in English circulation trace back to this same cohort, usually without the citation and almost always without the hedge. What the evidence does and does not show lays out the full picture. The sauna safety guide covers the part that is not statistical at all: alcohol, heat, and the contraindication list.

Which writers get credit here?

Three, none of them connected to this site in any way.

Lassi A. Liikkanen writes saunologia.fi and the books that come closest to a modern design canon. His arguments about ventilation, bench geometry, and stove mass shape how the build pages here are ordered. Glenn Auerbach has spent years documenting what an American backyard sauna actually takes, in a register no Finnish source provides. And Trumpkin’s Notes — free, book-length, compiled from Finnish and European sources — still holds the sharpest technical argument in English about why so many American rooms disappoint their owners.

All three are reviewed honestly, limitations included, in the sauna bookshelf. No link on that page earns this site a cent.

Beyond the named authors sits the r/Sauna consensus and a long tail of builders who publish their mistakes. Where a page synthesizes that, it says so rather than presenting folk knowledge as research.

What is the site set in?

Three open-licensed typefaces, served from this domain rather than a font service.

Typeface	Designed by	Used for
Fraunces	Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi, Undercase Type, commissioned by Google Fonts (2018)	Headings and masthead
Source Serif 4	Frank Grießhammer, Adobe (2021)	Body text
IBM Plex Mono	Mike Abbink at IBM with Bold Monday (2017)	Bylines, tables, footer, small type

All three are released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Fraunces was drawn to demonstrate what variable fonts can do and carries four axes, one of which is named Wonky. It is set conservatively here, which is arguably a waste of a good joke.

The paper color is a warm off-white in the range of planed birch. The accent is the red ochre that Finnish outbuildings are painted with. Pages are static HTML — text, tables, and the occasional drawn diagram — and nothing here needs JavaScript to be read.

How are credits and corrections handled?

Generously in one direction, plainly in the other.

Anyone whose work informs a page is named on that page with a link, whether or not they would agree with the conclusion it supports. The sauna commentariat in English is small and everyone reads everyone; accuracy and credit cost nothing, and there is no version of this work that improves by picking fights.

Errors get corrected on the page itself, and the last-reviewed date moves with the correction. A source characterized unfairly counts as an error. So does a credit left off. The editorial policy carries the full sourcing standard and the corrections rule, and the contact page is where reports arrive.

For the books themselves, with the honest limitation of each named alongside its strengths, start at the sauna bookshelf.