The Archival Project: guides, maps, and brochures

January 6, 2025

I’m back from my adventurous trip to the optometrist to get a new prescription for my eyeglasses. Rachael’s off climbing into the West Hills and the Raven isn’t due to roll inq until late afternoon, so I decide to tackle the box of maps from the storage unit. We must have collected fifty or so maps from our various travels. Like books, they’ve been kept around not for reuse but because I like just looking at them and reminiscing about their role in our lives. While I’m at it I’ll look at the guides and brochures. Feels like a natural grouping to take ground on.

Guides

We aren’t actually dealing with the guides yet, but we have a plan for them. There is over a cubic foot box of them, mostly cycling guides but with hiking and field guides mixed in - maybe seventy or eighty of them in all. Some of these I suspect we’ll hang on to for sentimental reasons or even use someday, such as probably some of these:

Oh. There’s the book by Robert Pyle, whose living room Carol and I shared with his giant paper macho frog. When I talked about this place a week ago I said we stayed there after we were married, and laughed about with our friend Gary Rose in the army in 1970. But the book wasn’t published until 1974? Oh, now I remember - he hadn’t written it yet, I bought it in Powell’s Books some years later.

The rest though we plan to dispense with. Our plan is to come back in March and create an inventory of the ones we’re giving away post it here in the blog and the forum, and offer them up to anyone who might want any of them. After that any that remain.will go to a thrift shop or the library.

Maps

We have a quite extensive map collection too, another cubic box worth. We haven’t relied on a paper map in probably at least a decade, so I treat them the same as the box of souvenirs and triage the pile. The great majority of them are ones that will get tossed after I take a few representative images as reminders:

Large scale regional or countrywide guides, ones I’d pick up in the travel section at Powell’s Books when planning or dreaming up a new tour.

The smallest scale Michelin guides, small enough that it takes nearly a hundred of them to cover France. These I picked up while on tour as we entered or approached a new area, typically finding them in book stores or tobaccanists or tourism shops. I carried the current one in my back pocket or strapped to the top of the rear rack, where I could quickly reach back and pull it out when we came to our junction to confirm our route. What, we missed a turn again? Sorry, Rachael. We climbed this hill for nothing.

These are the hard copy maps from our tour of Japan. We also took Garmins with preloaded routes for the first time on that tour, or we’d have gotten thoroughly lost immediately. The top map shows the long line of our route, marked into zones (84-5, etc.) that correspond to pages from a complete detailed atlas of Japan I’d read about and mail-ordered months ago, the most detailed road source I could find. We carried along each page our path crossed, usually downsized to only include the portion of the page that was near our route. Space mattered!

Here’s an example of a typical map we travelled in Europe with in that era. This is a snippet torn from a larger Michelin map, with a black line drawn in ink of our planned route. Here, we’re leaving the Mediterranean coast at Saint Raphael and heading northwest toward Avignon and the Ardeche Gorge, on our way back north to Paris on our first European tour in 1993.

Another pair of examples. On the top we’re heading west from Narbonne to the Catalonian border on our 1997 tour from Nice to Lisbon, the inked line showing our route. The lower map is just an example of how space-conscious we were, carrying along only snippets of maps. We did the same thing with tour guides, often ripping out just chapters of the guide that were relevant to us and leaving the rest behind,

As with the souvenir box, there’s a second category of maps we’ll postpone a decision on. They’re small enough that they don’t take much space, and for whatever reason they have enough sentimental value that we may just end up keeping them. There no rush to judgement needed here.

Old favorites, and even ones that could still see use. I don’t imagine there’s been much change in the unpaved road network in the Crete Senese for example, or in the monopathi of Sifnos either. Could happen.

And this one is special for us because it’s the map from our first guidebook to France, from back in 1991 when we thought we were going to bike from Paris to Athens until Yugoslavia began to fracture and sent us down to New Zealand instead. The book and the map drove many of our planning decisions though, highlighting destinations and scenic roads that looked attractive. A photo in that book is still the reason I want to see Honfleur someday.

And finally there are the lifers, the ones we’ll probably keep until we’re gone. There’s only one of these in the map group, the large-scale map of Western Europe. For fifteen years this map lined the wall of the back bedroom in our condo, and after each tour I’d trace the outline of the just completed tour on it. If we ever have a wall again we’ll remount it and catch up from the intervening years since it got folded away.

Brochures

Our remaining brochures are limited to programs from PIFF, rhe Portland International Film Festival that was the highlight of our Februaries for over a decade. We were film fanatics and would see between 30 and 40 films in a crazy 3 week space, fitting showings in around our work schedules because we were still full time employees. And, here are the programs from our three trips to Sisters in Central Oregon on the first weekend in September to the folk festival there, an event that took over the entire town - a big tent in the park with smaller stages in cafes and markets and off in the woods - another blast whirlwind of concerts interspersed with rides in the high desert.

That’s it for the brochures though. The mountain of playbills, symphony programs and dance programs all got tossed in the initial purge seven years ago.

Like with those other programs, we’re just retaining digital images as reminders.

The Portland International Film Festival

In the earlier years the catalogs were larger, almost like small newspapers.

Here are the complete calendars, showing filming showings by state, time and venue.

In later years they were standardized and condensed, squeezing out paper while keeping the same general model and content. We got more disciplined toward the end and would keep a file copy after we’d seen our last film - typically grabbed at the members-only closing night’s ceremony at the art museum, listening to a live band, sipping the free wine and chatting with other film fanatics. We later highlighted the file copy to show which films we actually attended.

The Sisters Folk Festival

Our first year. Standout memories are of Eric Bibb, Darlingside, and especially Heather a Maloney howling her impression of Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock.

Oh, lord. Baskery! The Shook Twins! Lake Street Dive!! I’ll never forget the spectacle the three blond, hyper-energetic Swedish sisters of Baskery presented, or of hearing and watching Rachel Price sing the first time.

2016: the last and probably the best one we attended. Richard Thompson! Shawn Mullins! Alastair Frasier! Ruth’s Foster, Caitlin Canty, Peter Mulvey, The Ballroom Thieves! And Baskery back again (they were based in Nashville at the time). I’ll never forget us sitting on benches at a small outdoor venue in the woods, listening to Thompson and Mullins taking turns, just thirty or forty feet from us. Pure magic.

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