Trending now: Memory Trays
Everyone has the drawer. Ticket stubs, a matchbook from a restaurant in Lisbon, a postcard bought and never sent, three foreign coins that aren't worth changing back. It gets opened twice a year and shut again immediately.
The drawer isn't the problem. The drawer is just badly organised affection.
A memory tray is the fix. One shallow tray, kept somewhere you actually walk past, holding the paper evidence of a good year. Not a scrapbook - nothing needs sticking down, nothing needs a caption. Just the things you couldn't throw away, given a surface instead of a drawer.
What to keep
The napkin with the restaurant name printed on it. The menu, if they'll let you take it, and they usually will if you ask at the end rather than the beginning. Matchbooks. Coasters. Museum tickets, which are almost always better designed than they need to be. The train ticket from the day it rained and you went anyway. Postcards - bought, written, never posted, which is the correct use of a postcard. Wine labels, soaked off in the sink the next morning while you make toast. A hotel key card. A shell, if the shell was good.
What to skip
Boarding passes, unless something happened. Receipts, unless the meal was worth remembering the price of. Anything you're keeping out of obligation rather than fondness. The tray works because it's edited. A tray with everything in it is just a smaller drawer.
How to build it
Flat things at the bottom, layered so the edges show. Menus and postcards do the structural work. Three-dimensional things on top - the matchbook, the coin, the shell - so the whole thing has something to catch the light. Wicker for holidays. Lacquer for dinners. Ceramic if you want it to look permanent.
Change it when it stops being about the year you're in. Everything you take out goes into the photobook, or an envelope inside the back cover, which is the same thing with less ceremony.
Then the photobook
The tray is the trailer. The photobook is the film.
Our three Papier x Glassette photobooks are made for the part the tray can't hold - the four hundred photos, the forty worth keeping, the faces. Keep the book with the tray, on the same table, and you've built the whole thing: the pictures and the proof!
