Dear Lee,

A million dollar potato photograph started me thinking about potatoes and collecting.

A 2010 photograph of a potato sold in 2015 for over $1 million. Simple—just a mud splotched potato and shaded lighting. Three prints were made; one is in the Paris home of the photographer Kevin Abosch. The second print was donated to a museum in Serbia. The last one was purchased in a private sale by a European man, a dinner guest at Abosch’s home. Why would a famous photographer get more money for a picture of a potato than for his portraits of Yoko Ono, Johnny Depp, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, or other famous people? Abosch said “I use the potato as a proxy for the ontological study of the human experience.”

We bought an Ohr pottery statue of a potato about 10 inches high that had just been found in storage in 1972. It cost $15. Not the most interesting piece of pottery by the eccentric George Ohr, but at the time my husband Ralph was selling fresh potatoes by the car load to the new fast food restaurant chains. It was a “conversation piece.” Today it is an important and expensive example of American art pottery.

Are there many collectors of potato memorabilia? We once wrote about a collector of potato chip bags (chips first made in 1853, first bagged for stores in 1895). There are giant potato statues in Siberia, Sweden, and a famous one in Australia called “Big Spud.” Then there is the Idaho potato truck seen in the TV ads and the famous Potato Museum’s baked potato statue in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Online we found dishes shaped like baked potatoes that hold sour cream, salt and pepper shakers, potato-shaped mashed potato bowls, Christmas ornaments, lip balm (made of potatoes and butter), and tee shirts. The most famous potato collectibles today are a long way from a million dollars. They are replicas of Mr. Potato Head, the Hasbro toy introduced in 1952, made famous by the movies and recent TV ads (although I can’t understand an ad where a potato eats a potato chip made from a relative). But the most expensive is a 2004 limited edition Mr. Potato Head covered in Swarovski crystals sold by Neiman Marcus for $8,000.