Definitely one of the more interesting and successful volumes in the Object Lessons series. It explores the history, significance and universality of collecting souvenirs on our travels - it appears that as far back as the pilgrimages travellers have always felt the need to take something tangible back home with them. In fact that’s how the first museums began – with people collecting and bringing home mementos of their travels and putting them in cabinets of curiosities to show to their family and friends. The author discusses issues of authenticity and cultural appropriation and apart from an annoying stylistic tic of calling the usually useless things we but “tchotchkes” with tedious regularity does so in a thought-provoking and informed way. And unlike some of the other books in the series, there’s not a smidgen of pretentiousness or self-absorption to be found.

Souvenir presents an incredibly fascinating look into society’s long-held obsession with, you guessed it, souvenirs. I know, I know, it seems like an incredibly specific thing to study but, as I have found whilst reading my first in the series of books that look at the hidden lives of everyday things, this minuscule part of modern society lends itself to far larger insights into wider themes of human behaviour, both in its personal and social forms. And once a person learns how far back the activity of souvenir gathering goes, it is easy for posit how the ritual almost seems to be ingrained in some way in the human psyche.
The need of early Christian pilgrims to gather the sand beneath Jesus’ cross. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson cutting chunks from Shakespeare’s chair.
No matter where in the world you look, throughout the ages humans have tried to document their travels through the collection of artefacts, meaningful or otherwise, in an attempt to prolong the emotions of the experience. Rolf Potts explains this in detail, referencing his own extensive souvenir collection, which he manages to weave in with wider societal attitudes in a way that thankfully does not come off as clunky or out of place.
Honestly, I did not realise the amount of joy I would get out of reading about a subject so specific and ordinary and that, my friends, is why this book will not be my last in the Object Lessons series.

“In French, the word souvenir is commonly used as a verb, and means ‘to get back to myself,’ or ‘to remember.’ People have brought home travel mementos since 2200BC when an Egyptian prince brought back leopard skins and elephant tusks to present to the pharaoh. Potts writes a lovely ‘little book/ essay/ musings’ on souvenirs, both entertaining and informative.

‘Piece of the rock’ souvenirs are physical fragments of the destination. Potts tells a humorous story about pilgrims taking ‘Jesus touched’ dirt off the sanctuary floor and church caretakers hauling new dirt back in. Latin emperors of Constantinople sold a chunk of the 'True Cross' to pay off debts or pawned the crown of thorns to fund a war against the Bulgars. Sometimes relics were even labeled, “soil drenched with the Blood of Christ.” That’s why I’m a cynic with that stuff.

Wealthy travelers collected worldly curiosities (ostrich eggs, a whale jawbone, a stuffed crocodile) meant to impress visitors. In 1715 Richard Boyle brought home 878 pieces of luggage from his year long continental journey. Some items from travels like these eventually ended up in the British Museum for others to learn from and enjoy.

As travel became more affordable, souvenirs became more mass produced. Postcards emerged in the late nineteenth century. Like most mass-produced souvenirs, they are cheap, mobile, self-contained, and easy to collect – like souvenir spoons. The US souvenir and gift market generates $19 Billion of revue a year. That’s a lot of kitsch.

“When we collect souvenirs, we do so not to evaluate the world, but to narrate the self.” Potts’ short, charming book illuminates our trinkets, treasures, and memories. Since we were children, collecting objects was a way to familiarize “ourselves with the world, its possibilities and our place in it.”

Thank you to NetGalley, the author and publisher for granting access to an arc of this book for an honest review.

A short meditation on why we collect the things we do. It was heartbreaking to read how treasures of historical and literary significance were harmed so that people could take a piece of them home.

A very interesting book covering the history and psychology of souvenir collecting (as distinct from collecting for museum collections, etc.) from antiquity until now, pinned around the author's collection and his feelings about it. Really well done, interesting and readable.

I'll be submitting a long form review to Shiny New Books on this one and will link to my review when I do.

This is the first book I have read in the Object Lessons series but I will be looking for more. The whole premise of the book is fascinating. The book itself seems very well researched and is written in an engaging style. (It originally caught my eye because the souvenir on the cover is one I brought home from Paris.)
My thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you to Bloomsbury Academic for providing me with an advance copy of Rolf Potts' book, Object Lessons: Souvenir, in exchange for an honest review.

PLOT- Object Lessons is a short non-fiction book series, where different authors explore the history and meaning of ordinary objects. In this installment, Rolf Potts explores souvenirs.

LIKE- This is my second book in the Object Lessons series. Last week, I read Susan Harlan's Luggage. Perhaps it was the subject manner, but I was much more engaged in Potts' Souvenir, than I was in Harlan's Luggage. These books are relatively short and I was so throughly entertained by Souvenir, that I raced through it in a single sitting.

Potts writes about the concept of souvenirs through the ages; Christian pilgrims searching for relics or how in war, physical pieces of the enemy were kept as tokens. One rather grizzly and disgusting mention was of soldiers who would take their enemies teeth and have their own rotten tooth replaced with the one they captured. That's a fact that I won't soon forget.

Taking physical pieces of important objects has destroyed many great monuments and artifacts. Potts writes about how it was so common in the 1800's to take a piece of Plymouth Rock, that local businesses sold chiseling tools for those who had forgotten to bring their own. Eventually, the rock was so damaged, that it had to be fenced off. I was shocked to read that during a visit to Shakespeare's home in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams took a slice of wood out of a chair that the Bard had supposedly sat on. If you visit Jefferson's home, Monticello, you can see his stolen piece of wood. 

Why do we collect the things we do? Why is it important to buy cheap reminders of our travels? Potts speaks about how as children, souvenirs are an important form of identity. They are ways that a child shows what they admire or where they might want to travel later in life. When I was a kid, we went to Hawaii every year. This was great, but we never traveled anywhere else. I filled my room with pieces of other states and countries given to me by friends who had traveled there. In high school, I was obsessed with wanting to travel to New Orleans     (Thanks Anne Rice) and anything New York, so my room was filled with Mardi Gras masks and Broadway Theater posters. I still haven't been to Louisiana and it's still high on the travel bucket list.

Potts writes about the type of things people collect. Some people collect cheap, physical objects, like a miniature Eiffel Tower, where as other people seek out objects that feel more authentic, like a food item or textile manufactured locally. Souvenir will make you think about your own collecting habits. It will make you reflect.

Until my mid-twenties or so, I fell into the cheap, physical object category. Shopping was a vital part of my tourism experience. I wanted to return home with my suitcase filled with stuff. I vividly remember this from my trips to Walt Disney World. I spent hundreds on souvenirs. In 1999/2000, I went nuts for Disney Pins. Pin trading was a big deal, but I wanted to have them, more than I wanted to trade them. In just a few years, I bought thousands. It's mortifying to admit. Now, they are collecting dust in a box somewhere. They are pretty pins, but they certainly don't reflect my memories of my travels. They are completely unimportant, almost a burden.

My need to own and collect has changed dramatically. In the last six years, I've been to several countries in Europe for the first time and I've hardly bought any souvenirs. I've savored the experience and taken pictures, rather than feeling the need to own objects from every place that I visit. 

There are a few exceptions. We usually spend a few dollars on a magnet. It's a joy to look on our fridge and remember all of our travel experiences. If I find a local bookstore, I will buy a book written by a local author. This is mainly to support local writers/booksellers, but I love how this also has a way of extending our vacation, especially if the book is set in the same location of where we traveled. I also seek out books, primarily novels, about the place where we are traveling, before we go. I'm not precious about these books, I pass them along to a new reader as soon as I'm finished.

I will also buy food items or fragrances. This is my favorite way of extending our vacation and sharing our experiences with others.  It's a temporary souvenir, but one that I savor. Enjoying cheese from Amsterdam or Victoria Plum jelly from England on a sunny day in California, takes me right back to Europe. It's time travel.

DISLIKE- Nothing. Object Lessons: Souvenir is a thoughtful and entertaining book.

RECOMMEND- Yes! Object Lessons: Souvenir is a great read for anyone who loves to travel or collect. It's engaging and thought-provoking. It will make you examine your own tourism and collecting habits. I look forward to reading more books in the Object Lessons series.

3.5. I enjoyed reading this book and found the premise interesting and engaging. This is more of a “dip in and dip out” book. It feels very well researched and will make me think about the souvenirs I encounter on my next trip.

In this volume belonging to the Object Lesson series, the author focuses on all the souvenirs, providing also an historical perspective about the first relics that religious pilgrims used to take home.

The short book faces the theme from the market point of view - souvenir kind and tourist requests - keeping into account also the industrial replicability and the tourist psychology, who wants both to keep memory of a travel or an experience, and something that reflects the location history (e.g. to confirm that exotic places are inhabited by savages).

I think Souvenir is one of the most interesting book of the series because of the way the topic was dealt with.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me the copy necessary to write this review.

This is my first read from the 'Object Lessons' series, which I have been meaning to get to for some time. What an absolute delight this little book was. While it confirmed some of my own thoughts around keepsakes, souvenirs, and mementos, it also made me consider my personal psychology around acquiring/collecting these throughout my life.

I enjoyed the structured way that Potts took us from how the evolution of travel and tourism changed the way travelers and tourists viewed and identified with souvenirs to his own journey of collecting them during his sojourns. Some of his revelations, like souvenirs people collected during lynchings in 19th and early-20th century America, are horrifying and made me wonder about similar souvenir traditions in other earlier societies that we may not know of due to a lack of records.

I do wish he would have gotten to non-Western societies and their particular souvenir rituals sooner than the last quarter of the book — where he did a lovely job of going into the Japanese tradition of omiyage. Also, I wish he had taken a bit more time toward the end to explore how social media has replaced, at least among millennials, the souvenir tradition. Certainly, I see more and more people sharing travel photos on Instagram and Facebook than bothering to lug souvenirs home.

All that said, I do highly recommend this book and look forward to reading more from this particular series.

Everyone has at least one souvenir sitting on a shelf or hanging on a wall. Why do we buy them? What do they represent? How did the practice start? All these questions and more are answered in this cute little information-packed book.

There are three types of souvenirs discussed in Souvenir: physical fragments, local products, and pictorial images (i.e., postcards, t-shirts, keychains, shot glasses and tiny Eiffel towers). Beginning with Christian pilgrims taking a bit of the dirt where Christ walked to Thomas Jefferson peeling a chunk of wood off Shakespeare’s chair, physical fragments began the search for souvenirs. Demand for local products has benefitted cathedrals to African tribes. It has also promoted world trade and knock-offs as varied as shrunken heads made from monkeys, fake hangman’s rope and “Australian” boomerangs made in Bali. How the age of email and the selfie has impacted pictorial image sales is addressed within Souvenir too.

In addition to what is used for souvenirs, Souvenir suggests the various reasons that souvenirs are acquired. Both history and culture are explored.

A fascinating discussion on an overlooked subject. Souvenir is a great book to read before a trip especially on an airplane, train or cruise ship. 4 stars!

Thanks to the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic, and NetGalley for an advanced copy.

As an avid collector of souvenirs myself, I was intrigued by the concept of this book. Many of the anecdotes and historical facts presented make for interesting reading. However, it is not a book you just pick up and go with. In some places, I felt that the minute details given were unnecessary and led my mind to wander. But over all, it is an interesting read.

Well researched, incredibly detailed and well written. The philosophy of why people collect souvenirs is explained and referenced with facts from history. The chapters are structures around the authors actual souvenirs, which makes for an interesting insight. I really liked this book, it played to my sense of curiosity and love of collecting things and the reasons for which we do.

Really interesting look at something I’d never thought about before! I enjoyed it.

Souvenir completely fit Object Lessons’ profile of being a series that “paints a picture of the world around us, and tells the story of how we got here, one object at a time.”

Besides the cover, what caught my attention was that the author was Rolf Potts, whose work I’m familiar with and have quite enjoyed. Souvenir did not disappoint. In a short, novella-length piece, Potts covered the history or souvenirs from religious relics to “13 tons of contraband Eiffel Tower kitsch!” which were confiscated by Parisian police. The way he looked at things such as a possibly authentic Shakespeare chair in a similar vein to the religious relics – who knew how many sets of a saint’s bones had been found-was fascinating.

I’d recently had a thought about some made in China souvenir I’d picked up and how souvenirs had, in some ways, lost their connection to what they depicted. But as he also addressed, the souvenir might be about the physical object, but it might be about the memory of where the object came from. I personally am more likely to keep the found items type of souvenirs: ticket stubs, museum brochures and the like, but there are items such as a flamenco poster from a 1996 trip to Spain that I remember the exact moment of purchase.

I liked how he traced the history of post cards, once called postal cards. They are, for me, the type of souvenir buying that has changed the most over time. At first, they were cheap and I enjoyed sending them to friends & family back home. Plus the photos they were with were much better than something I could take with a film or early digital camera. Then I wasn’t sending them as often and sometimes felt “I could take a better version of that photo”. Recently with the advent of drone photography, it’s back to “wow, I can’t get that photo”. I don’t always send them, but rather use them as photo memories of a trip. This is also true of items in a museum which maybe didn’t allow photography or the light was too dim to get a good one.

I also really liked how he used his own souvenirs to tell the broader story of what made a souvenir. These ranged from a “seashell” he collected on a trip where he first went to the beach as a child, to a fuse box pilfered from (and later returned to) a plane crash in Colorado as a teen, to theater masks collected while traveling in Asia. This also allowed him to explore the intersection between souvenirs, museum collections and the evolution of museums today, another area of personal interest to me.

All in all, a wonderful, quick read. I look forward to reading more in the Object Lessons series as I think this is a wonderful vehicle for exploring the everyday world.

Souvenir by Rolf Potts is a history of what people collect to remember their travels. Potts has reported from more than sixty countries for the likes of National Geographic Traveler, the New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, Conde Nast Traveler, Outside, The Believer, The Guardian (U.K.), National Public Radio, and the Travel Channel.

Bloomsbury’s look at common objects focuses on souvenirs in this edition. Starting at a shop that specializes in Eiffel Tower souvenirs and moves to the history the things we buy “to remember.” Souvenirs have a long history starting with collecting religious artifacts in the middle ages. The Sanctuary of the Ascension build over the spot where Jesus ascended into heaven has a paved floor except for the spot where the event occurred. No one wanted to pave over the sand and dust that made contact with the Saviour’s feet. This sand and dust became souvenirs to pilgrims who would grab what they could. More enterprising people sold sand to pilgrims claiming it was from the sanctuary. Other religious relics circulated. One would feel quite lucky to have purchased the head of John the Baptist in the Holy Land until he returned home and found two other heads of John the Baptist. Religious items were the first souvenirs collected by travelers. Later it moved to exotic animals and items and then moved to collectible teaspoons and postcards, and finally Chinese made Eiffel Tower keyrings.

Potts does an excellent job of connecting the object and the desire to remember places, and even show off places one traveled too. As traveling became easier the market for souvenirs increased. And if one does not want to actually travel one can buy online the same keyring sold in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. A well-written history of something we take for granted and an industry we support on almost all our travels.

What a fascinating book! Are you someone who will always, without fail, pick up a souvenir while you're on vacation? For some us it just wouldn't be a vacation without looking for that perfect little souvenir. My first memories of vacation souvenir hunting was on The Boardwalk of Ocean City, MD. A piece of jewelry,usually a ring that was going to turn my finger green (and one for my mom while I was at it). A Christmas ornament that would remind me of where it was purchased while decorating the tree every year. A piece of artwork. I love this little book. I found it through NetGalley.com, but when the hardback version comes out in March, I want a copy on my shelf. An autographed copy would be perfect!!!!

I went into this book expecting a more lighthearted read like some of the others by this author and found it a little heavier and more history-laden than expected. Unfortunately this meant it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea but it’s a well put together book on a subject i have never really considered before.

This series seems to be self-consciously launched out of Barthes' Mythologies, each one offering up a riff on a common, often pedestrian, mundane, and over-looked object - here souvenirs.

Potts takes a more historical approach than some of the authors in this series, looking at how modern souvenir collecting has its roots in the medieval pilgrimage. Thinking about the souvenir as a shorthand, a concrete memory of experience or a vehicle to make the faraway tangible are all helpful. This is perhaps less surprising than some of the titles, but still, at around 120 pages, a thoughtful and entertaining long essay.