Organizing or displaying photo prints and travel/life mementos

July 25, 2016 10:19 AM

I'm not much of a packrat and overall I'm pretty minimalist. But I do have a few boxes of ticket stubs, used airline tickets, museum pamphlets, photos, cards, and letters. Should I keep it all? What's the best way to organize or even display (some of) it?

To give you an idea of the scope:

- A few dozen each of ticket stubs, airline tickets, pamphlets, media clippings
- A hundred or so cards and letters (some from people who are no longer alive)
- Several hundred photos
- Half a dozen old student IDs or badges (from back when I had hair!)

Now, these are all in study archive-style boxes and are not hurting anyone. If this stuff just stays in a slightly messy but well-contained box in a closet, it's not the end of the world.

Keeping this stuff has proved useful. Example: I had old friends visit this weekend and it was really fun for us to all dig around in the boxes (we shared a lot of the same trips). The thing is, I'm not sure there's utility in having all of it. And it's not like digging around in the memory box is an everyday activity. It's more like once every few years or maybe once a decade.

And looking through some of the mediocre travel photos, I thought: "Huh, this is a pretty crappy photo of Prague. Do I really need to keep this?" But then I realized it was next to some other photos of Vienna, and it reminded me how my friends and I traveled from one city to another. In other words, the photo itself was lousy, but there were a few good memories triggered by having it around.

Another example: I found a 15-year-old receipt for some neckties and wondered why I had kept it. Then I remembered how the salesman and I were flirting with each other and my friends all jumped on it and it was a fun little memory.

But then again, I found a pamphlet from my visit to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and thought: "Well, I already have several photos from the museum and the ticket stub. Do I really need the pamphlet?" Surely some of this stuff I can let go of, right?

I'm curious as to how people decide what to keep and what to ditch.

I'd also like to hear wisdom on what people have done to display or organize their loose/random items. I'm aware of the whole "take a photo of it and part with the original" option, and that might work for some things. But, as digitally inclined as I am, somehow having a scan of some of these ticket stubs isn't going to trigger quite the same memory. And if that's the case, maybe holding on to something that's paper thin and a few square inches is just fine?

Bottom line: I'm looking for products (ideally available in Canada) and strategies to display or organize random bits of travel and life mementos and/or ideas on how to decide on what to keep and what to part with.

I don't think I want to create scrapbooks, but maybe I'm wrong?

Thank you!

posted by veggieboy to Home & Garden (6 answers total)

I'm all for minimalism, but this sounds like space-efficient sentimentalism, which, as far as sentimental physical objects go, is basically ideal.

It sounds like you want to keep it. It also sounds like it's not hurting anything. It's totally okay to keep it.
posted by aniola at 10:22 AM on July 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

it sounds to me like a lot of the fun of this box is the hunting-discovering aspect. I doubt you would sit down and leaf through an album of greeting cards, but having a memory box to dig through and pull randomly from sounds fun (and takes less space.) I personally don't keep flight stubs as all flights are the same, but photos, cards, museum stubs? Yes please.
posted by fingersandtoes at 10:30 AM on July 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

For travel: I usually take a Tom Bihn Field Journal with me on big trips. It's basically a 10x8 cloth-covered binder. Ticket stubs, pamphlets, post cards, etc. get stuffed in it, and I'll also take notes in it. After I get back, I transfer the contents to a similarly-sized binder, first mounting the smaller looser tickets and such on paper (literally, a couple swipes with a glue-stick) while sticking the larger items (this would work for photos, too) in small plastic sleeves. You can get these items at Staples, etc. At this stage, I weed out items that don't strike me as evocative; the attractively-designed museum ticket stub stays, the map goes. So I end up with a little binder chronologically organized that reflects my trips, but doesn't require all the effort of scrapbooking. It's probably not as sturdy or externally attractive as a well-made scrapbook, but, honestly, it doesn't need to survive me. Although I'm not generally sentimental about physical objects, images of these items just wouldn't be the same.
posted by praemunire at 11:27 AM on July 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is what I use scrapbooks for. I didn't do it before I had kids, but now that I do it's nice to have a place to paste in things like tickets alongside photos from trips and events. My scrapbooks are pretty low effort affairs.
posted by town of cats at 11:33 AM on July 25, 2016

In a previous house, I made a collage on a giant cork board from things like that. It brought me joy that Marie Kondo would approve of.
posted by Ruki at 2:59 PM on July 25, 2016

I collect all my memorabilia during the year and once a year I make a sort of collage page of all the significant events that happened during that year. It's usually 2 or 3 photos and a ticket stub, travel tickets, business cards etc. I frame the "collage" in one of those glass frames with the clips from the dollar store - the 11in by 17in size - and put it on my wall. I scan anything that's left that I might like to remember onto my computer and then I recycle it all.

I do this every year and the growth of the display is super pleasing to look over. And, it's in my hallway so I look at this stuff often which is nice.
posted by eisforcool at 9:24 PM on July 25, 2016