Everyone wants to be remembered, but the human memory is notoriously fallible. No one is going to remember exactly everything that took place in your performance next week or next month, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have any influence at all over what is remembered. Rather than jump immediately into every possible aspect of memorability right away, let’s suppose that there is just one big effect that you want someone to stick in someone’s mind.
It’s a pretty standard doctrine by now that it’s a good idea for your act to produce something tangible that your audience can physically carry away with them. And doing so can produce a number of benefits if it’s done correctly.
Giving away a signed card at the end of an ACR isn’t going to cut it. It’s just a normal playing card with some writing on it. Who needs that? It’s going to go straight in the trash when the recipient arrives home.
What about an object that visually tells a story about the impossible way in which it was produced? Something like the card with the shadow of a missing pip from Jay Sankey’s Reconstruction?

That’s heading the right direction, but it’s not like anyone’s going to frame a normal playing card just because it has a bit of soot on it. Smart money says anyone but a true hoarder drops that in the trash as soon as they’re out of sight as well.
Even better would be a custom-made card, a piece of art that would be worthy of attention and display in its own right (stay tuned for a tutorial on how you can do so from the comfort of your own home!), but I’d be very surprised even so if even one in ten people actually bothered to save and display it.
I’ve been to a lot of close-up magic shows recently. No fewer than four in four different cities over the course of a month. And every single show resulted in at least one souvenir for me or the layman whom I dragged along to these shows. Here, I have rated them from worst to best in terms of what you would like a souvenir to be.
- A soggy signed card (straight to the trash)
- A custom deck (I’m playing with it right now. I love it. But it’s just a regular deck.)
- A rose (a perfect reminder of the effect in which it was produced—but also, of course, abandoned in a glass of water in a hotel room)
- A full, sealed plastic bottle with a signed card inside (also abandoned in a hotel room—you can’t even take it on an airplane!)
- A fork twisted into a card holder (brought home and displayed on my desk)

If you think memorability of your performance is desirable (and I am not arguing you must), and if you want to reinforce that memory by providing a souvenir, these are the qualities you should ensure the object has (and yes, I mean ALL of these qualities, not just as many as possible):
- Uniqueness: something the audience has never seen before and will likely never see again anywhere else. (E.g. a card featuring his great-grandmother posing as a centerfold)
- Impossibility: something that the audience can’t easily make themselves and certainly couldn’t make the way they saw you make it. (E.g. the very key to the car they arrived in encased in a solid block of resin)
- Portability: something that fits in a pocket or pocketbook and is easy to carry home. (E.g. a five-dollar bill folded into an origami dong)
- Independent Utility: something that could reasonably be sold as a tchotchke in a souvenir store. (E.g. an attractive keychain pendant that, when you look at a light through a hole in its side, reveals the participant’s naked grandmother playfully hiding her chest behind the signed, selected card.)
- Direct Connection to the Effect that Produced It: something that cannot be seen without instantly bringing to mind the effect you want remembered.
Take this list of criteria and use it to measure the five souvenirs I received this past month and see if you come up with the same ordering I did. I should note that criterion 5 is the most important one for effect-specific memorability. It counts as much as the others combined.
It follows that not every effect is suited to be memorialized with a souvenir, but you’d be surprised how you might incorporate natural souvenirs into the effects you already enjoy performing. That said, don’t take any of this as an argument to start trying to wedge souvenirs into your act just to make it more memorable, or adding effects to your act just so that you can produce souvenirs. But if you are already giving away things with your performances, you might want to see if you can find ways to improve them so that they don’t land in the nearest circular file the moment you step out of view.
Bonus
What if you want someone to remember EVERY effect you did? Try this: put something in an envelope and give it to a participant with instructions not to open it for a week. For instance, seal your last answer in a Q&A routine and request the asker of the question it answers to think about the question themselves, only opening your answer when they have come to a decision/solution. Inside is a card with an answer on one side. On the other side? A compact description of your entire show complete with a confabulation of the choices the audience made along the way. Maybe the participant will throw the card away after reading your answer, but maybe they’ll take a quick pic of it before they do. At the very least, they’ll come away with one more reminder of everything they saw—but I’ll leave the topic of reminders for a future post.