Postcrossing Blog

Morten (aka bokmorten) comes from Norway and has been using Postcrossing since 2014. We learned about his work as a librarian and children’s books expert, and got curious about how he found us and how his Postcrossing journey has been going.

How did you get started sending postcards? What is your earliest memory of them?

When I was 8, my father introduced me to stamp collecting. That was a link to sending and receiving post as well. Later, in my teens, I had pen pals home and abroad. I have always been curious about other people, their lives and customs.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

I read about Postcrossing in the newsletter of Foroya Post (Faroese Post). Tried it right away, and I’m still here.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

As you might see, we live in a small village/suburb with rural surroundings.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

I am not a collector per se, so there are only a few cards I’ve kept, using them as decorations or book marks. Among those, I’ve been enjoying some “Gesamtkunstwerk” where stamp and card share the same theme. Like the Gaston from France:

Or this Austrian card and stamp with Ukraine flag theme and some of the Moomin cards from Finland with related stamps.

I must also mention the very nice Hungarian postcrosser who sent me a Hungarian translated version of a famous Norwegian children’s book. She’s still a Facebook friend.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies or collections?

I’m a frequent contributor to Norwegian Wikipedia, awarded “Wikipedian Of The Year 2013” in Norway. I also write and edit other non fiction writing in local history, children’s literature history and in the Norwegian academic encyclopedia Store Norske Leksikon.

Is there anything else that you are passionate about?

Through my work, I am the proud and eager editor and publisher of children’s books in the threatened minority language Southern Saami, and into other Saami languages as well. This work has awarded us two national awards, among them 'Library of the Year 2019', and two times nominations to the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s largest children’s literature prize. Read more about our work in English, or Scandinavian (for Scandinavian readers and those putting their trust in web translations).

Thank you for answering our questions, Morten!

Oh, happy day! 🎉 Unbelievable as it sounds, Postcrossing turns 17 today!

Thank you for coming along on this journey with us, lovingly “spamming” the world with brilliant postcards and friendly words, making sure everyone has something to look forward to when they open their mailboxes. That feeling of finding something there never gets old, does it?

We’re especially thankful for the kindness being shared beyond borders, for all the funny images and fun facts that make us laugh, for all the thought and care that is put onto these little pieces of mail… We believe this community truly makes the world a better place, postcard by postcard.

By the way, did you know that haikus have 17 syllables (arranged on a 5–7–5 pattern)? Seems like a good occasion to try one out, so here it goes:

Postcards in the mail
Seventeen years of magic
Friends around the world

Ahah… at least we tried! 😅

Please do join us in celebrating this special day, and grab a piece of cake while you write some postcards (or haikus)! We’ll be doing the same from our little office here in Portugal, thinking of you all over the world. 🥰

PS – We’re using this opportunity to tweak the blog, increase the font size and make things more readable overall. Let us know what you think!

This is one of those posts in which we’re jealous of the Little Mail Carriers, because they’re doing all the cool things in our bucket list… 🙄

Some time ago, Cathy (aka beesknees) offered to take them on a visit to the Space Center in Houston, and who could refuse an invitation like that?! The little ones couldn’t get on a padded envelope fast enough in their eagerness to get to Texas! I’m sure you’re just as curious as we were to know about their trip, so here they are to tell us about that adventure.

Hello from Houston… or as they say it around here, howdy! 👋 We’re super excited for today’s visit, and to show you all the rockets and cool things happening here at the Space Center.

But first, a bit of explaining. The Space Center Houston is the visiting center of the NASA Johnson Space Center (or JSC for short), where human spaceflight training, research, and flight control are conducted. The JSC was built in 1961, and named after the late US president and Texas native, Lyndon B. Johnson, and has been running for over six decades now. When Neil Armstrong said “Houston, the eagle has landed” in 1969, or when Apollo 13 astronauts famously said "Houston, we have a problem" — this is the Houston they were referring to!

So the Space Center is a bit like a museum to showcase all the history and cool stuff that happened (and is still happening!) at the JSC, and we’re eager to explore everything. Even before you enter the building, there’s neat things to see!

Check out this amazing replica of Space Shuttle Independence, sitting on top of the original Shuttle Carrier Aircraft 905! Because shuttles don’t land in the same place where they take off from, carriers are needed to bring them back. Carriers start out as normal Boeing 747 planes, but they are modified to transport shuttles on top of them. A plane carrying a plane on its back! 🤯

Around the appropriately named “Rocket Park”, you can also see other rockets, like the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle, Little Joe II…

… or Saturn V, a “super heavy-lift launch vehicle” (aka the big part that spews fire and sends things into orbit)! It’s hard to convey how massive this thing is. In fact, it is the tallest, heaviest and most powerful rocket used to send humans into space and was regularly used during the Apollo moon program. It has three parts (or stages) that separate at different times, and although the bits here at the Space Center did not make it into space, they were definitely ready to!

Right, it’s time to go see the exhibitions, learn about the different space missions and meet some astronauts inside.

Here are astronauts Shannon Walker from the USA, and Soichi Noguchi from Japan. They have both been in several missions to space, using different kinds of spacecrafts — including the Dragon 2 capsule for the SpaceX Crew-1 mission. Mr. Noguchi retired this year and is now the honorary director of the CupNoodles Museum. Honestly, we’re a bit jealous of him because how seriously cool is that for a career pivot!

One thing you can explore in the museum are the high-tech spacesuits that several astronauts wore on their missions, and how these have changed over the years. And you can also check out the inside of a command module, which is the control center and living quarters for most of the lunar missions. It looks quite tight for the humans in there, but I think it would be plenty of space for us.

We were especially intrigued by the red planet and the missions that made it there! Feeling the textures of a real Mars rock on our feet was a unique experience. Do you think humans will make it to Mars soon? We hope so… then perhaps we can slip into someone’s pocket, and have an adventure in space!

Because the museum is right in the Johnson Space Center, you can see actual space things happening there — like astronauts training in simulators, or the real Mission Control room monitoring astronauts in the International Space Station. Just… wow!

Before leaving, there was still time to salute Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. USPS has issued a stamp in her honor, and we used it to stamp our little passport. We also added a pressed penny from the Space Center, and browsed the postcards on the gift shop on our way out.

And so our visit has come to its end, and we’re a little sad to go… There’s so much to see and learn here at the Space Center in Houston, and we really hope y’all will be able to visit someday!

Our huge thank you to Cathy for taking the little guys on this grand adventure! I wonder where they will end up next… 🤔

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

This month, we’ve chosen a prompt that Tomoe (aka Sleep) suggested in our writing prompts thread on the forum. If anyone is a fan of comics, you’ve probably thought about this one already, but it’s a fun question to ask anyone—and trickier than you might think to decide!

I am a comics fan, so I have a head start in thinking about this: I love Captain America, Captain Marvel, Wiccan, Hulkling, Spider-Woman and her fellow spiders, America Chavez… But would I want those powers for myself? Flight is cool, and I’d certainly feel better about my impact on the environment if I could just fly myself to the library… but it might not be much faster than walking, and it seems like it must be tiring!

In the end, I know what I’d choose. The first one would be self-healing abilities, so I can heal up quickly from any bangs and bruises (not to mention my persistent eczema) and work with infectious diseases in the future without fear. And the second would be time manipulation. Imagine if I could just stop time for everyone else and read a book? Imagine how much I could get read with an extra hour in the day…

I’d love shapeshifting too, of course, and more flippantly, I’d definitely love the superpower of making a cape look cool… but I can only choose two, and my heart is set on self-healing and the ability to stop time. What about you, fellow Postcrossers? Tell us about the two powers you’d choose in the comments, or write about it on your cards this month!

Here we go again!

The calendar tells us it’s less than 4 months until World Postcard Day, so it’s time to start preparing for the big day. First things first: the design contest to choose this year’s representative postcard is now officially open!

The theme of 2022's contest is the topic that has inevitably been on everyone’s mind: World Peace. It’s in periods of conflict that we truly understand how important peace is — without it, nothing else is achievable. Postcards can be tiny ambassadors for peace, delivering messages of hope, connecting people across borders and promoting more awareness about the world and its cultures.

We hope this theme inspires many of you to pick up your drawing tools and create something beautiful for this year’s postcard, which will later be shared and sent to all over the world.

Before you do so, please make sure to read the rules carefully. You can submit your designs (in digital form only) until July 15 on the contest page, and we’ll announce the winner until August 15.

And, as usual, there are some prizes! Besides the guaranteed warm fuzzy feeling of having your design be the one to represent the World Postcard Day, we’re also giving away one fantastic Wacom Intuos drawing tablet for the first prize, and a trilogy of Austin Kleon books for the second and third prizes. We’re big fans of Wacom’s versatile drawing tablets, as well as Austin’s pragmatic and inspirational advice for artists (which really applies to everyone). All winners will also receive a Pantone postcard box, to round things up. YAY! 🎉

Even if you’re not brilliant at design, we hope you’ll help us spread the word about the contest and poke your creative friends to participate… especially if they are aspiring artists and could use a little push to put their art out there. 😊 We can’t wait to see how everyone will interpret this year’s theme!