Storing letters

wasted pixels

So my girlfriend has a fair bit of downtime at her job. While most people would just watch TV or thumb through a magazine, she writes me letters. One every morning, like clockwork. Not just short, hastily scrawled notes, either, but gorgeous, flowing tales about her adventures in the world, the things in life that she treasures, and confessions of her love for me. She mails one every day on her way home from work. It's pretty fucking awesome, if I do say so. Her goal is to write enough to fill a book, and judging by the stack on my desk, she's well on her way.

Now obviously I pretty well fucking treasure them, and I want to safeguard them. Battered, ripped envelopes just won't cut it. I'd like to put them in a (really nice) binder of some sort for storage and safekeeping. I couldn't bear to take a three-hole punch to her letters, so that's straight out of the question. But I don't want to put them into plastic sleeves or something, because they're love letters, you know? They're classy.

So what I need is a way to store hand-written letters. It has to be non-destructive, but it also has to be tasteful. Does anybody have any suggestions or recommendations? Are there any products out there which are geared toward storing precious letters and documents in an attractive, tasteful way? I hope you guys can steer me right.

mooshoepork

Some sort of box? I just use an old small wooden chest.

tardcore

You could get a scrapbook large enough to put paper into. Check Wal-Mart or Target for something like that. They'd be well protected, organized, and all together in a nice, neat little package.

Vrtra Theory

Everyone's version of "classy" will be different, but it sounds like you might like one of those leather-bound envelopes with a string closure. Something like this or this. That might be more money than you want to spend though, especially since storage-wise you'd probably need 2 envelopes per year. (I don't know how many of these letters you already have.)

DrHookenstein

Although you said you would rather avoid this, if you really do want them to last a long time, I would suggest you get acid-free plastic sleeves (folks use them for photo-albums) and keep them in those until you find your preferred solution.

I understand this isn't your preference, but if you use anything other than this or a hermetically sealed container, you risk losing them to any angelfish or other paper-eating organism / chemical interaction.

Ruckus

I'm thinking any off the shelf photo album might work. About big enough for one 8.5x11 letter per page.

DrHookenstein

Not all of the photo-albums out there have acid-free paper, fyi.

My family discovered that when all of their old photographs started yellowing, etc.

KMFurDM

As little moisture as possible and no sunlight.

Andrew_Jay

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devoir

I'd also scan them at regular intervals so if the unthinkable happens, you will have some evidence of your girl's adorable method of expressing herself to you.

E-mailing them to yourself on a GMail account is a great way of storing them somewhere safe.