Mikkel Aaland Brings Sweat Back With New Naked Sweat

Mikkel Aaland’s Sweat is coming back to print. The 1978 cult classic will return this September beside his new book, Naked Sweat, in a limited two-volume Collector’s Edition from Bathhouse Books and Therme Art.

That makes this more than a reissue. One book catches global bathing culture when Aaland was a young photojournalist roaming from Finnish saunas and Russian banyas to Japanese mushi-buro, Mexican temescals and Native American sweat lodges. The other finds him nearly half a century later, looking at what survived, what changed and why everybody suddenly seems to be building bathhouses again.

The set contains two softcover volumes. Sweat is a digitally restored facsimile of the original. Naked Sweat brings together new photography, essays and reflections, with a foreword by artist and WET magazine founder Leonard Koren. Bathhouse Books has not yet published the page count, dimensions or size of the limited print run.

The Book That Kept Sweating

Aaland spent three years traveling and photographing bathing traditions before Capra Press published Sweat in 1978. Its full title was wonderfully unwilling to choose a niche: Sweat: The Illustrated History and Description of the Finnish Sauna, Russian Bania, Islamic Hammam, Japanese Mushi-Buro, Mexican Temescal, and American Indian & Eskimo Sweat Lodge. The original ran 252 pages and ended with instructions for building a sauna or sweat bath.

It was scholarship, road book and how-to manual sharing one towel. A recent MIT Press history of countercultural bathing called Sweat the standard back-to-the-land bathing manual of 1978, praising the mix of research, first-person experience and humor. The book has stayed available digitally, and much of it can still be read on Aaland’s website, but the print edition has been out of circulation for years.

Its timing now feels almost suspiciously good. In 1978, Aaland had to explain that sauna was only one branch of a much older global family of hot rooms. In 2026, American operators are borrowing from those traditions to open social saunas, bathhouses and contrast-therapy clubs faster than the language can keep up. The old book supplies the long memory. The new one gets to ask what this revival is actually reviving.

A New Book, Not a Victory Lap

Naked Sweat is billed as a contemporary companion rather than an update. Bathhouse Books describes it as a book of new images, essays and reflections on “the art and soul of sauna and global bathing culture.” That distinction matters. Revising Sweat into a tidy 2026 guide would erase the thing that makes it valuable: it shows what one curious traveler could see before infrared cabins, Instagram bathhouse launches and the modern sauna business existed.

Aaland did not exactly leave the subject alone. He went on to host the seven-part Perfect Sweat documentary series and co-founded Sauna Aid, which has delivered portable saunas in response to war and natural disasters. Naked Sweat brings that later life back into conversation with the book that started it.

How the Preorder Works

The Collector’s Edition is priced at €120, about $139 at mid-August exchange rates. The first preorder is specifically for attendees of the International Sauna Congress in Oslo. Orders are due by September 9 and must be collected during the Congress, which runs September 24 through 26. Aaland will launch the set and speak at the Naustet Sauna Book Café.

Readers who are not traveling to Oslo should hold onto their towel. Bathhouse Books says worldwide ordering through the publisher and selected booksellers will open after the Congress debut. It also invites readers who cannot attend to contact the publisher about alternative arrangements.

Collector’s editions can become an excuse to add a slipcase, a numbered card and $80 to a familiar book. This one has a better reason to exist. It puts the document that helped a generation rediscover sweat bathing beside the account of what Aaland found when he kept looking.