[3] To recruit members for his society, Nordström went through Sveriges statskalender, the official yearbook of public administration, and collected names and addresses of every person he could imagine having an interest in the subject: physicians, teachers, clergymen, civil servants, etc.
[6] The first volume of the annual journal was published in 1936 and had about 550 pages containing 21 papers, mostly in Swedish but with summaries in English, German, or French, and more than 150 reviews of books.
[9] Sarton, who had known what was in the doing but had refrained from reporting on the foundation of the Swedish society until its first publications came out, greeted both enthusiastically in a combined review in volume 26 of Isis.
"[10] Nordström was a student of literary scholar Henrik Schück and had written his own dissertation (1924) on the philosophical fragments of the 17th century poet Georg Stiernhielm,[11] and the focus of articles published in Lychnos long remained early modern science and thinking, including parts that would now be considered unscientific but were connected to the early development of modern science, such as astrology and alchemy.
[12] An explanation for this focus on the early modern period offered by the American scholar Robert Marc Friedman is the "general lack of formal training in natural science" in what he calls the "Uppsala school".