An inventory of items I can't bring myself to throw away would mystify even the people closest to me. A valentine from a boy I had a crush on in the third grade, my late mother's charge card from a long-defunct department store, the glove left behind by a friend who died before she could retrieve it, the tee my father used when he hit a hole in one - it's a sentimental assortment of seemingly random objects, most of them worthless to anyone else but priceless to me. Let someone who has no idea what they stood for in my mind get rid of them when I'm gone. Those of us who suffer from this impulse to form irrational attachments to the things in our lives can take comfort in the fact that Orhan Pamuk shares our affliction. "Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago," he explained in a phone interview. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it. So much in fact that, as a companion project to "The Museum of Innocence," his best-selling novel published in 2009, Pamuk opened an actual museum of the same name in Istanbul last April. This month he published a catalog of the museum's contents, "The Innocence of Objects" (Abrams), in which he takes us on a tour of local artifacts and grants us access to recollections of his own youth. The museum was conceived in tandem with the novel, and every item in its collection, assembled over more than 10 years, figures in a memory Pamuk invented for the characters he imagined. "I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul," he writes. In its first three months, the Museum of Innocence attracted more than 11,000 visitors, who came to gaze at a hair clip, an earring, postcards, empty soda bottles, a cut-glass saucer, cigarette butts. The presentation calls to mind Joseph Cornell's boxes, creating surrealist juxtapositions and silent conversations among things that seem completely unrelated. It comes as no surprise to learn that until age 23, Pamuk aspired to be a painter, venturing on occasion to Cukurcuma, the residential neighborhood in which the Museum of Innocence is located, and photographing its streets in scenes that served as the basis for the watercolors he produced at the time. In fact, Pamuk has never stopped regarding the world from an artist's point of view, pausing to note the cast of the light and finger the texture of a fabric, carefully selecting the objects that appear alongside his characters as he renders them in fine strokes with a few words. Although the conceit of the Museum of Innocence has no precedent in literature, it would sit quite comfortably in the realm of conceptual art. Still, many gallerygoers, having grasped the premise and toured the installation, might not bother to read the novel. And what a loss that would be. In "The Museum of Innocence" Pamuk tells the story of Kemal, a young Turkish man on the verge of his engagement, who embarks on an affair with Fusun, a distant cousin, and falls victim to his own passion. Love makes fools of us all. Pamuk likens it to a traffic accident, "something that happens to us rather than something we control," he says. The chapters of "The Innocence of Objects," whose titles parallel those of the novel and the museum's displays, document the emotional devastation: "The Agony of Waiting" contains a clock, its inner workings exposed, against a red baize background like the cloth that covered the table when Pamuk's grandmother and her friends played cards to kill the time. "An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains" is a pharmacist's model of the body's internal organs, tracing the symptoms of longing and regret. "To Entertain a Small Hope That Might Allay My Heartache" features a letter in which Kemal grovels, still in its envelope. His abject obsession with all things related to Fusun escalates, as each object enables him to relive their moments together and brings temporary relief from the torture of her loss. Kemal speculates that the word "museum" derives not from the ancient Greek word for the meeting place of the goddesses who inspire the arts but from "mausoleum." The Museum of Innocence is his Taj Mahal. Though Pamuk was not a collector in any serious sense before he set out to make a museum, he admits to being incapable of disposing of certain things. "I get used to my fountain pens and my clothes," he says, "and I can never throw them away. I replace them only when I see that they are broken or embarrassing to wear. This fondness for the inanimate seems to have found its way into the lives of his characters early on in his career. In "Silent House" (Alfred A. Knopf), his second novel, published in Turkey in 1983 and only recently translated into English, an elderly widow awaits the annual visit of her grandchildren, and the objects in her everyday surroundings sustain her, like the presence of a friend. "You're there, my furniture, you're there, next to me, as though you know I'm here," she thinks after turning out the light. Pamuk's own grandmother, he says, would open a drawer and lovingly remove a bottle of cologne or some other souvenir of happier times. She had a water pitcher and a glass, and she would look at that and think about eternity or the emptiness of life and address this to us, her grandchildren. And we felt sorry for her, for her pessimism expressed through objects. New-age dogma urges us to live in the now - advice that has paradoxically gotten louder at a time when most of us are more encumbered than ever. A multibillion-dollar self-storage industry serves one in 10 American households. Consultants specialize in helping people get rid of stuff they've accumulated. "Hoarders," with its real-life cast of pathological examples, averaged 1.6 million viewers in Season 5. Hoarding now qualifies for the roster of diseases and conditions on the Mayo Clinic's Web site. "Modernity means overabundance," Pamuk says. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare. The difference between collectors and hoarders is, to Pamuk's mind, largely a distinction of class. Many of the objects now in his museum, having escaped wholesale consignment to the junkyard as 20th-century Turkey rushed to emulate Europe and America, owe their survival to eccentrics Pamuk recalls as "ill-tempered, jealous and despondent," many of them estranged from their families on account of the things they amassed. They were, he writes, "fully aware that their attachment to objects stemmed from personal heartbreak and sorrowful life histories, but they remained honestly convinced of the importance of their contribution to the very society that mocked them." The Museum of Innocence vindicates those compulsive keepers of a history too mundane to qualify for the marble halls of national institutions. Pamuk's models for his project were the small house museums he visited in his travels around Europe: Sir John Soane's Museum, in London; the Gustave Moreau Museum, in Paris; the Frederic Marès Museum, in Barcelona; the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, in Milan. Pamuk's introduction to "The Innocence of Objects" concludes with his own manifesto. Tenet No. 3: "We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are richer, more humane and much more joyful. 11: "The future of museums is inside our own homes." In deciding how to display the things he acquired, Pamuk was struck by "their loneliness," and it led him to "the shamanic belief that objects too have spirits." There was a time when I lived in Paris and frequented the flea market, where the detritus of lives that had ended or moved on was piled up on display. Divested of the memories that once attached to them, mirrors, soup tureens, fire screens, sconces, ottomans, picture frames and candelabras were forced to fight for their survival, ingratiating themselves to passers-by on the basis of their charm. An overwhelming sense of melancholy pervaded the stalls; the dealers seemed resigned to it, as if it were just another occupational hazard, like frostbite. I came to see the cluttered aisles as a way station for objects crying out to be adopted, and I rescued as many as I could. Sometimes I wonder where they've been and who loved them first, but I'll never know: the clock resets to zero each time someone new acquires them. Pamuk has taken in orphans and enshrined them in a memory palace open to the public, assigning them a past that will never be forgotten.