What’s so life-affirming about collecting and trading miniature animals, keyrings, stickers and pins? We visit one of the 1,500 trinket exchanges to find out
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’m standing, holding a thumbnail-sized glass owl, in front of a pink box filled with a boggling kaleidoscope of colours, shapes and textures. There’s a plush elephant wearing a green and pink sombrero; a rubber oval that is part doughnut with sprinkles, part frog; a bubble tea keyring; stickers and pins; a sparkly tangle of bracelets and much more. My mission? To swap my owl to experience first-hand the buzz of trading at a trinket exchange.
Boxes filled with tchotchkes that visitors exchange for their own trinkets are popping up everywhere. Emerging in the US last autumn (Philadelphia had one of the first using a ready-made electrical junction box, a popular format), they’re a new iteration of a phenomenon that started with Little Free Libraries and diversified during the pandemic into myriad neighbourhood installations.
Rachael Harms Mahlandt, a Portland-based artist, has been creating and cataloguing what she calls “sidewalk joy” since 2022 (her yard hosts a mug exchange, seed and stationery swaps, and a mini-library “for itty-bitty books”). She started a world map of installations in 2024 and it just keeps growing. In the past two months, the map has gone from 800 to nearly 1,500 sidewalk delights, and the UK is a hotspot. “We had one spot for the longest time, then the trinket box trade has taken off.”
