keepsake

plural keepsakes

1. An object given by a person and retained in memory of something or someone; something kept for sentimental or nostalgic reasons.

   Clam-shells are fashionable keepsakes. You write your name and the date inside one and your friend writes hers in the other and you exchange.

   1913, L. M. Montgomery, The Golden Road

   5 more examples

   And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.

   1843 December 19, Charles Dickens, “Stave Two. The First of the Three Spirits.”, in A Christmas Carol. […], London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC, page 69

   My little keepsake—only a brooch—lay on the table at her bedside, with her prayer-book, and the miniature portrait of her father which she takes with her wherever she goes.

   1859 November 26 – 1860 August 25, [William] Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], published 1860, →OCLC

   He wished you to have it, as a little keepsake he had prepared—it is only a purse, Miss Wilfer—but as he was disappointed in his fancy, I volunteered to come after you with it.

   1864 May – 1865 November, Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1865, →OCLC

   It seemed to me that if I owned an elephant that was a keepsake, and I thought a good deal of him, I would think twice before I would ride him over that bridge.

   1880, Mark Twain [pseudonym] (Samuel L[anghorne] Clemens), A Tramp Abroad; […], Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company; London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC

   He walked on hastily, and as he went he hid Jezebel's keepsake first under his cloak, and then deeper, under the sober grey justicor, or waistcoat, near the place where his Presbyterian heart was beating all too unsoberly.

   1905, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, The Cherry Ribband: A Novel, page 8

2. historicalSpecifically, a type of literary album popular in the nineteenth-century, containing scraps of poetry and prose, and engravings.

   […]it was the Italy that we know from the steel engravings in old keepsakes and annuals, from the vignettes on music-sheets and the drop-curtains at theatres; an Italy that we can never confess to ourselves—in spite of our own changes and of Italy’s—that we have ceased to believe in.

   1875 January–December, Henry James, Jr., Roderick Hudson, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co., published 1876, →OCLC; republished as Roderick Hudson (EBook #176), U.S.A.: Project Gutenberg, 18 September 2016

   1 more example

   He had brought the last “Keepsake,” the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time; and he considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic verses as capital and sentimental stories as interesting.

   1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XXVII, in Middlemarch […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book III