Dear Lee,

This email arrived last week: “I have a pretzel shaped like the year 2000. It’s in excellent shape and is almost 10 years old. Are there any collectors that might be interested in it?”

That email got us thinking about odd collectibles. There’s a museum in France filled with bread of all shapes and sizes. The displayed loaves and rolls from all over the world were varnished to prevent mold.

You’ve probably heard about online sales of a piece of toast, a grilled cheese sandwich, a pebble and a pretzel—each featuring an image of the Virgin Mary; a pancake, pierogi, potato chip and fish stick picturing Jesus; and even potatoes shaped like Jay Leno and Mickey Mouse. Some sold to a casino looking for publicity, but we don’t know any serious collectors who save pretzels.

We do know a collector of potato-chip bags and suspect there could be a pretzel-bag enthusiast somewhere. Very few things are NOT collected. We have written about collectors of sawdust, pari-mutuel ticket stubs, banana stickers, pencil erasers, toilet paper, discarded grocery lists and even shrunken heads (although it’s illegal to sell real body parts).

In this month’s newsletter, you’ll find our report on a sale of laundry antiques that included a collection of “bride sticks.” We had never heard of those before. We went to an exhibit of oddities at the Smithsonian years ago that included barbed wire, telephone insulators, hair jewelry, skeletonized leaves, carved coal pictures, painted cobwebs and more—but only the cobwebs were new to us.