Dear Lee,

Collectors should be happy to know that no matter how strange a collection, sooner or later someone else will become interested in it. Then, if you’re really lucky, national publicity will encourage others to save the same thing. Our banana sticker collection, which we’ve written about every once in a while, has been a joke since we started it in the 1980s. But collector clubs have formed, and strangers send us stickers they’ve saved on a refrigerator door or collected on a trip abroad. The stickers are a surefire laugh when we do a talk show.

But now we can tell you about the icon of banana stickers-the record-price holder. In January, a $20 U.S. bill printed in 1996 sold for $25,300. Somehow a Del Monte banana sticker got stuck on the bill during the printing process at the Bureau of Engraving in Fort Worth. The bill’s number and the Treasury Seal was printed over the red, green, and yellow sticker-creating an error collectors call a “retained obstruction.” While the price is amazing, we were impressed that someone was clever enough to realize a bill with a sticker would have value. This is a lesson for collectors-always think about the oddities you discover. An Ohio college student withdrew the bill from an ATM in 2004. He was clever enough to put it on eBay, where it sold to a currency collector for $10,100. That collector then asked Heritage Galleries to auction it online. The latest buyers are not numismatists. They’re not even collectors. Jackie and Bethany Morales live in Cleburne, Texas. Jackie heard about the bill, decided he had to own it, called, established credit, then bid by phone and won against 13 other bidders. The couple have been interviewed on television and are enjoying their 15 minutes of fame. We own the same Del Monte sticker. It says Ecuador (where the bananas are grown) and 4011 (the code for common yellow bananas). We are putting a picture of the $20 bill with our sticker. Now, at last, food sticker collectors can show their collections with pride. One of ours hit the big time. So cheers to the ATM user and to the worker who must have laughed when he put his now famous banana sticker on the bills going through the presses.