Summer is calm with lots of sunshine and splashing in the water?

That’s correct!

But if you are a poster hunter, it is so much more. If you are a poster hunter, the summer of 2022 was a hunt – on three fronts.

First: It was a quest for an end. At an end where at some stage you get to tell the printing house to start printing.

We worked frantically on our book ”Come to Norden”. The book consists of 320 pages with texts and images that we tried to finish to perfection. Countless details swirled in our heads, facts needed to be triple-checked, pictures had to be placed in the right order.

The book is all about Nordic tourism history. About how the Nordic countries were drawn onto the world’s tourist map from the end of the 19th century until the 1960s.

It consists of tributes to the artists. It is a glutton for creative graphic design. It reveals the finest slogans created by the best Nordic wordsmiths.

And one day, right in the middle of summer, we finally could shout out: START THE PRINTING PRESSES!

Second, there was a hunt for the ultimate cover for the book. When a book consists of almost 200 colorful posters, it gets a little tricky. Should we have Danish agriculture on the cover? Finnish lakes? Norwegian fjords? Icelandic volcanoes? Stockholm?

Finally we found our inner poster calm.

No, it needed a stronger Nordic symbol. Finally we found our inner poster calm. The artist Ingrid Bade (1908-1989) created one of our favorites in the 1930s: With soft lines, she captured the magic of the Finnish and nordic fells in 1936. In Bade’s image, the tourist is engulfed by the magical landscape – she becomes one with nature.

There we have our cover!

Ingrid Bade is also a brilliant example of Nordic cooperation. She is Swedish but lived in Finland for several years. We like that very much!

Third, the summer of 2022 was a hunt for posters.

We had realized that we had to find an original vintage poster for the Faroe Islands. We wanted to broaden the horizons in our exhibition, which is shown at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. So we hung out at international auctions, contacted collectors, tore our hair out.

And then suddenly it happened! A collector in London had come across a poster. It was unique and it was stylish. And when something is unique and stylish, there’s no stopping the poster hunters. We simply had to have it.

The poster hunters were so out of their minds with Faroese happiness that we had no choice. At the very last moment, we had to call out a counter-order, the classic: ”STOP THE PRESSES!”

Moreover, if you have a poster for the Faroe Islands, it must also be included in a book called Come to Norden. So now it’s there, in the book. And later in the autumn it will also be included in our exhibition.

Yes. Of course you get pumped up from all this hunting. But now that autumn is here, the poster hunters can sleep peacefully and dream new sweet poster dreams. The book has been published.

And the poster hunters know that new exciting hunts await around the corner.

Magnus Londen, poster hunter @Come to Finland & Sweden

To celebrate the new book, you can now get it at an introductory price of -25 percent for one week, until September 21, 2022.