Displaying My Collection
How I Display My Patches
A lot of people ask me how I organize and display my actual collection (not just the images in the online gallery).
I adapted the patch display system of a great friend and amazing patch collector, Sergeant Paul Simon (ret), of the New York City Police Department. Paul has over 30,000 patches in his collection, so I figured whatever way he organized his collection was good enough for me.
First, I decided to segment my collection by jurisdiction within Virginia (ie, city police, city sheriff, county police, county sheriff, town police, etc.). I then organized those jurisdiction into 3″ binders. I currently have a total of 15 binders that hold my entire collection, however, I’m about to split the city police from two volumes to three volumes. On the spine of each binder I’ve placed patch images of the first agency represented in the binder and last agency represented in the binder, as well as the volume number, if applicable. See the image below for an example:
Within each binder the patches are arranged alphabetically by agency. The first page for any given letter has a list of all of the agencies that begin with that letter printed on the top. If I have multiple patches for any given agency, they are arranged in order of the current style to the oldest style, with any special unit or badge patches displayed the same way. See the image below for an example of the inside of one of the binders:
Each patch is affixed to a light gray piece of card stock with the smallest amount of masking tape possible, then inserted into a light weight page protector. Using light weight page protectors will allow you to fit more pages into a single binder – and it also makes it easier to get the pages in and out as your collection grows.
For extremely old, fragile, or rare patches, I bypass the masking tape and simply insert the patch into its own individual page protector to prevent any damage to the patch.
Well, that’s it in a nutshell. If you have any additional questions about my collection, please be sure to let me know.
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