High School Yearbooks - Keep or Toss?

Faced with moving into a new, smaller house and an ever-diminishing bookshelf situation, I'm sitting here thinking that I will never want to look at these 14-year-olds again, and especially never look at 14-year-old me again. Did you get rid of your high school yearbooks long ago or do you think I will regret this when I'm 80?

remembering is one of my favorite activities so I would say keep it. plus it might be something to show your kids if you have kids/are gonna have kids

I have kids, but I have other pictures of myself from when I was a teenager.

Pictures where I was alive and breathing.

Plus, I could scan anything relevant, like this guy did:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/98/363953743_80926e5cdd_b.jpg

yeah but it's high school you know, a specific context and place..they may want to treat it as a historical relic

xp rofl

and you can go "and I banged this one...this one...second base with her..." and be mega creepy

tossed mine. now my 10 year reunion is imminent (tho i'm not going), and the associated facebook group is filled with pictures of my classmates and i don't remember half of them.

See, I'd totally go to a reunion, except I missed my 10 year because I was living across the country at the time.

I probably would too tbh, but I'm living too far away.

i care little to nothing about my own highschool yearbook, but i LOVE looking at old ones. i have my grandmother's college yearbooks from '30-'32, one from the early and late 40s (forget the years), 1952, 1963 (my mom's), 1969, '72 and '80 (and my sophomore yr one from 1991). i picked them up at various book/yard sales because i love love love looking at what people actually looked like during different eras, including the old teachers and how they were clinging to the fashion of their times. i even have one from 1928 from the boys' school that is on my bike route to work.

the only problem is that they are VERY big and heavy and i feel like this collection makes me kind of a hoarder :-/

I'd totally go to a reunion,

I think this is probably a good test. If you would go to a reunion, keep them. If you wouldn't go, toss them. My 20 year reunion is this year, and I don't care, just have no interest in seeing any of those people again.

See, I have an interest in checking in with these people again someday, but not seeing at age 16. Teenagers are just vermin alien to me at this point.

The only yearbook I bought in high school was my senior year; 15 years down the road, I wanted the rest of them so badly I took out an ad in the local paper. No response. Another 10 years have passed, and now somebody has scanned and posted every page of every yearbook from my high school from 1960 and beyond. So to answer your question...I'd keep them. I didn't (didn't even have them in the first place), regretted it, then got lucky.

I say keep them. You'd think these things would all get scanned and put on some high school yearbook webpage by now.

I actually just got an e-mail from my college alma mater this morning informing me that a bunch of yearbooks have been scanned and put online.

I still have mine, but most of them are at my parents place so i only get em out once every few years when mum does her ritual of "you havent lived here for 20 years CAN I THROW OUT THIS SHIT OF YOURS" rant.

all of my school stuff was thrown out (yearbooks, photos, reports) when my parents' house was cleaned out. really pissed me off at the time but now i'm glad i don't have any of that junk lying about. on a bored whim i had a look at the FB page for my year at school, remembered a couple of the names but didn't really recognise any of the faces..

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i keep mine in my bathroom in my parents' house.

As others have noted, even if HS was not such a hot time for you, and you've kept none of the same friends, and you inwardly wince when you look at your yearbook today, it is a relic of a specific time in your life. I tossed mine long, long ago when I was moving often and it was an encumbrance; now I wish I had it again, if only as a spur to memory.

My recommendation is, stow it deep in a box and only find it again when you're 50.

Aimless OTM

I have mine in a box somewhere in my apartment. I prefer looking at it occasionally to ppl from HS I don't remember trying to friend me on F'book.

Tossed. I get rid of just about everything these days.

Just about everything? Why Simon?

Mine are buried in a box in my parents' attic somewhere, and I have no desire to ever see them again, so a vote for toss.

c) find out who became famous in your class and sell on e-bay accordingly

Christ, I hope nobody from any of my high schools became famous, I feel shitty enough about how my own life turned out enough as it is.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

A good friend's grandmother kept hers and would draw a big X and write "DEAD" over the people's photos as she learned of their deaths. When she died my friend thought about doing the same to her grandmother's pic but I don't think she ever did.

kinda like broca's brain innit

whaaat

wait, wrong thread

btw Scott's yearbook scan is so awesome and solid I can't think of any way to honor it except maybe get a full back tat of it, it is that good.

never bought yearbooks in high school at all. toss.

I paid for a yearbook and it never arrived. I was also never asked to write anything to go in it. Think I'm just going to print out 60 copies of scottyearbook.jpg and pretend that was my school year.

(Considered typing "might have slightly fewer interchangeable clones than the real thing" but nah, I'm not that bitter. Probably)

haha! that yearbook thread i did was the most use i ever got out of my yearbook:

so sad all the time. so stoned...

"i don't drink beer it smells"

LOL

BTW i still have mine ... i still have mine from junior high, in fact. i've kept two of them because one was signed by Ricky Proehl (when he was 18), another was signed by Michael Ian Black (when he was 18 -- and my classmate), and therefore might be worth something to someone.

nothing like a high school yearbook, or in my case a full class group photo posted publicly to facebook last friday, to remind me just how much i hated high school and most of the people in my class. i thought maybe i was exaggerating to myself how overwhelmingly shitty they were but no -- looking at the photo, there were a few alright people in my class but the vast majority of them legitimately just sucked. i don't really find myself in situations as an adult where i have to be surrounded by hundreds of people i really don't like and i am very grateful for that. high school sucked.

I really liked high school, but I tossed mine years ago. No regrets. Those things were heavy; I graduated in a class of like 600.

Always liked the quote from My So-Called Life: "if they made a yearbook of what really happened, it would be a really depressing book."

i still have my yearbook collection and still enjoy looking through them but my own yearbooks are like visual poison

classic but i am sort of hoar- i mean archivist

I liked high school and like looking at my old yearbooks with my kids, I vote keep

I never bought a copy in the first place.

for a while i was scanning the yearbooks and i made a blog. this is the archive. i scanned a lot of photos! http://yearbookeditor.tumblr.com/archive

my scanner broke and i stopped having insomnia so the blog died a quiet death

why are US yearbook quote things all written in particular/peculiar way?

What do you mean?

i noticed when the kavanaugh yearbook thing came up, that it was just a string of in-jokes and non-sequiturs.

but then it seems like everything in this thread is also written in that same style...? like a jumbled thank-you list on a hiphop album from the early 90s?

in and of itself it's not so strange, just weird that everyone seems to do it

even tracy ann lucas starts with some lyrics from mark e smith dustbin before leading into the more standard stuff:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/25/364584012_fde98b55b2_b.jpg

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/120/364584013_f1f6828453_b.jpg

“I ain’t afraid of no dose the Grateful Dead party” is something i immediately want to know all about.

Kaori Itakura otm