"I worry that hanging 50+ tiny items (or even most of them) is madness and doomed to failure"

You'll only fail if you give up. I think it's a great idea.

I'd put them tiled in large frames.

Well, the approach that springs to mind is a variant on the clothes line. Take some plain white string and stretch it across the area where the art is to be hung running between two eye-hooks. You could do a couple of rows if you wanted. Then get thee to Staples or an office supply store and buy the smallest metal clips you can and simply clip the tract to the string, knotting the string through the clips handles to keep them from sliding around and preserving the spacing. Et voila! Just remember that particularly in the 'loo, you'll probably have to pick 'em up every once in a while as inveterate toilet readers will likely leave them heaped on the edge of the bathtub or on the tank. Have fun!

Clothesline is EXACTLY what I was thinking!

But I wouldn't put it in the bathroom. Steam and moisture kill paper goods.

I like the clothes line idea - perhaps with jute twine for the natural look.

Alternatively - you could get the little self adhesive photo corners (used for scrapbooking). The 3M kind come in 250 qty boxes for around $3. It would be much more time consuming but you could arrange a more specific placement. You could test out sticking them right to the wall so you could create placement patterns or you could arrange them on posterboard (maybe covered with decorative paper or a smooth fabric) then frame them. The photo corners come in a few colors too.

Here's another idea. If the area you are hanging them is not extremely breezy you could use a piece of moudling like this one:
https://encrypted-tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSOEBSfo51XH3WzTYpUqSNBBv6mLDrCdY0rc6zQSNNiw0kHODXEmA

Then use it like a tiny shelf to display the cards and other flat art if you want linear placement.

Ditto about putting them in the bathroom, too steamy.

http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/fotoclips/

How about these fotoclips? You could arrange them in a grid like shown or more creatively, so that it flows with the stairs. I've been thinking about these for my instagram photos.

What the hell is a Chick Tract?

I think a really neat idea might be hanging just one in a slightly larger frame, or hanging 3 in a series of mid-size frames, and rotating the tracts out depending on your mood or before you have people over. You would only have to buy 1-3 frames and you could safely store the rest until you swap them out.

Patrick, an explanation for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_tract

Patrick(The Other One), chick tracts are little religious pamphlets/comic books that condemn anyone who is not an evangelical christian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_tract

I feel that I'm about to become the Voice of Reason here. Chick Tracts are anti-Catholic, anti-gay, anti-evolution, anti-whatever (I didn't read any further). One wants these as apartment decoration, why, exactly?

And, I'm sorry to have to say, one doesn't curate gas-masks or wigs. I say, save some money, go to your local art museum, and buy a good quality print of an artwork that you find so extraordinarily beautiful that your heart does a little skip every time you see it.

I only hope you put the wigs and gas masks on styrofoam heads.... the image just delights me. How about imbedding
the chick tracts (god am old I have no idea what they are!)
into resin and make coasters and trivets.

To be honest I wouldn't display them at all. It doesn't really say 'welcome to my home' to have hate propaganda strung up all over the bathroom. Surely you can find something less offensive for the walls and if you really must display them, put them in the bedroom where your guests aren't going to see them. That's where my giant swastika lives anyway.

I agree that I don't approve of the message these send but I think the use here is ironic. Kind of the way people display posters or wear T-shirts of Che (a mass murderer). I would like to believe they’re being used to show how stupid the message actually is.

I am an atheist and yet I have pictures of the Pope because he’s wearing awesome hats and I have religious figurines because one glowed in the dark and the other was made of chartreuse wax (awesome!). I display them ironically not because I’m religious.

You can also buy wire curtain rods from Ikea fairly cheap and use those to hang clips from (instead of clothes line or cotton). I like the photo clips idea to create one large structural piece of art.

@Realcalm Some of us have hearts that skip at gas masks. Live a little, you must be a real treat at parties. From the Random House dictionary: "CURATE - to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation, as music or Web site content". Jessica is welcome to curate anything she'd like.
Also: chick tracts are anti-everything, its no use being offended. It's a little like getting mad at rain for being wet. I have boxes of the things and I'm a gay cynic, so take that as you must. I can't pass a streetcorner zealot without grabbing a handful.

I get that you're going for irony, but I'd still find a home filled with gas masks and hateful propaganda so uncomfortable. I once knew someone who displayed creepy dolls and some rather aggressively sexual artwork in her living room; it might have been cool to see in a gallery setting, but in a home, it just made your skin crawl.

I'm with RUTHTOOTH -- if you really want to display them, put them in your bedroom or another space that guests don't use.

Wow some of you are entirely too sensitive. Chick tracts are hilarious. I love finding them on the sidewalk. My local hipster bar even sells them in a vending machine.

How about under the glass of a glass topped table. That's were we keep ours. (I work in a restaurant in the deep south and these are often left as "tips" for the wait staff-especially on Sunday's.) We get a kick out of setting our coctails on them. ( deep in Southern Baptist territory here)

mount them in some of those clip type frames maybe? can't remember how thick they are so maybe that won't work. We gotta see a picture of the gas mask arrangement - now that should be in the bathroom.

and to the person who said you can't curate wigs or gas masks - you've never been to the bedpan museum in Germany, have you? Its right next to the stuffed bunny museum.

Chick tracts, eh? I'd say in the bathroom, wrapped around the toilet paper dispenser.

Wow, I thought I was the only one who gets a kick out of those ridiculous pamphlets. They are very well-drawn, though, especially those panels featuring the recalcitrant sinner cast into the lake of fire.

You can read 'em all on the Jack Chick website, too; sometimes I will wile away a weary afternoon doing just that. Haven't got saved yet, though, what with being a recalcitrant sinner and all...

She didn't ask what you thought about chick tracts, she asked for advice on how to display them! Anybody who also has a gas mask collection clearly knows where they're going, just not how to get there. Good grief!

Wow, I've never heard of chick tracts. I'm surprised to hear how common they are to other people.

Even though I love interesting collections and irony, this all just sounds like an awkward decor choice. Wigs might be innocuous on their own, but paired with gas masks and crazy propaganda? Add a collection of guns, and suddenly it's like a scene from Deliverance.

I agree that anything you collect can be curated, but that doesn't mean that it should be on display in a home. What if someone curates headless dolls and antique surgical tools? Shudder.

Whether it's in poor taste to display is up to the individual. People who know them probably get the context.

I'd actually like to see some of these as we don't get this kind of stuff in my city in Canada.

Jeezy creezy, some people don't get irony. I LOVE that you two collect weird stuff; do the stairwell with clothesline, or binder clips. And post pics when you're done!

Would you consider women exploitation imagery of similar "irony"? Hate group imagery is not art, not ironic any more than a burning cross on your lawn is "landscaping."

The correct reaction to "hate propaganda", ruthtooth, is to repudiate it, not to hide from it like a toddler terrified of the boogey man. One of the best forms of repudiation is satire... exactly what Jessica is planning.

I say attach the tracts to fibreboard panels that spell out the word "LOVE". Maybe with those old-fashioned sticky corner things we used to use to attach photos to albums? Apparently they're still available.

I love Blandwagon's idea. Hate these things but understand why someone might collect them. If you have enough, spell out the word "tolerance".

Buy the smallest binder clips you can find at Staples that will clip neatly around the entire thing, and then suspend them on fishing wire. Depending on how you space them, you could get 5 or 10 strands - I would think 10 strands hanging vertically could be cool if you hang them on the wall of the stairway. Especially since thanks to the fishing line they'd just be floating in mid air...

And to build on Blandwagon's idea, you can cut up a KKK poster and spell the word Kitten.

Yeah, I still don't get it.

Well I'm glad I at least brought up the issue of whether these are really suitable for displaying at home. What might be fun or ironic in a gallery or museum might not be fun at home. Worth thinking about anyway.w

And there's a whole other issue of maintenance. Things out on display get **dusty**. How would one handle dusting the wigs? What a lot of work. I think I'd try putting the gas masks and wigs in various combinations on styrofoam heads and making photographs.

Yeah....I'm not sure I get it. Irony is good in moderation. Irony so thick you can't escape it...well, it kinda' stops being ironic.

That said, to respond to the OP's question, I think putting them together in glass frames in a big collage could be cool, or using string and binder clips -- that way people could read them if they wanted. I'd say in the staircase since the bathroom would likely destroy these things.

Nice collection! I see you have a lot of the out-of-print "Bible" tracts. I'm dying to know what those hidden ones are near the bottom of the pile. If you'd like to decorate your condo with something "nice", why not sell some of the rare tracts and spend the profits on some cutesy trinkets assembled overseas by Chinese factory workers? You could arrange the trinkets into the word "QUALITY" for ironic effect.

And is that a "Satan's Master" up at the top? Ooh, la la!

I'm with you, Patrick. I guess that to me, maintaining hate propaganda even ironically honors it too much. I'd like MY environment to be removed from such things. It will be a better world when nobody enjoys OR laughs at this crap.

Would you find it amusingly ironic to have a little black jockey lawn ornament? And, even if so, would you want your black friends to see it? Are you SURE they wouldn't be offended?

I would consider scanning the really choice ones and putting them into resin. Others, you could either use the originals or copies and use them to surround the word" beLIEve". Just my personal taste. Usually when someone tries to give my husband something like that he says "Throw away your own garbage." So something playing on that might be interesting. Chick tracts are humorous comics that are full of fire and brimstone. The provided endless laughter for my friends growing up, especially when we signed up an "enemy" for the mailing list.

I wonder if they would look good in one large poster frame, each held in place with picture corners?

@ PATRICK (THE OTHER ONE) -- it condemns EVERYONE, including the OP and her boyfriend who want to post it. Anyone who sees it is going to know it's intended ironically.

Have you ever SEEN a chick tract? they are bloody hilarious.

Yes, yes, I know, they say that I and everyone I've ever met (and everyone in the world except for about ten people) are going to be thrown in a lake of fire for all eternity, yada, yada. People don't collect Chick Tracks because they can tolerate the message. They collect them for the irony of the fat that they are so over-the-top that they actually give the opposite message than what they intend.

I do sometimes feel guilty laughing at the crazy person. But when the crazy person won't stop ranting about how I'm a devil worshiper who's going to burn in hell for eternity and uses these bloody hilarious things to try to prove it -- well, it's hard not to laugh.

Chick's bile is directed at EVERYBODY. Which (ironically) makes it less offensive than if it were directed at just one or two groups. We're ALL targets, so we can all laugh.

Ha! I used to collect those, but then I threw them in the recyling.

The question was for ideas how to display the pieces - not "Do you approve of this message?"

People collect and/or display things every day that may be offensive to someone else. Thankfully you have the choice not to visit the homes that offend you. In this case - I don't think you were invited....

Hope you post a picture of how you choose to hang the items.

Alternatively - I work for an art gallery and would be able to assist you in selecting some fine art if you are in the market. LOL :)