The narrator of Sarah Rainone’s first-person story picked the Ireland Cow Plate up at a mysterious general store because “there was something about it that was both Indian and Irish, something that transcended the religions that divide nations and men.”

James Parker’s hardboiled character Floyd Haruspex muses, regarding the Kitty Saucer, “Why had someone left it in his car last night, this little milk-saucer with the face of a cat painted on it?”

“Now that Budd Schulberg has died, the story of how I stole this plate from him can finally be told,” writes the narrator of Adam Harrison Levy’s “Star of David Plate” — published a day or two after Schulberg died.

The narrator of “Uncola Glass,” by Jen Collins, recounts that she received this object as an “abandonment present,” at age 13, from a father whose general disposition of wiseassery had positive and negative aspects.

Thomas McNeely’s story, “Cat Mug,” claims that this mug’s only redeeming aesthetic feature is “the patina of mold we were never able to wash from the right side of its nose,” which at least “offset its louche, ridiculous, wall-eyed gaze.”

The Marines (Upside-Down) Logo Mug inspired Tom Vanderbilt to write a story from the perspective of a systems operation manager for a custom-printing operation, a man so efficiency-obsessed that his personal philosophy is downright aerodynamic: “He wanted his surfaces clean, his leading edges freed from drag, he brooked no laggards in his drift.”

Mimi Lipson’s story, “Halston Mug,” offers an excerpt from the lost diaries of Andy Warhol, in which the Pop Art maestro marvels at a mug he receives as a party favor from the fashion designer Halston: “Mugs, like from a truck stop. They had wavy American flags on them, too, and when I asked Halston why they had the flags, he said, ‘Don’t you think it makes them so much more butch?’”

Ben Greenman’s story claims that the Smiling Mug was crafted by the Belgian surrealist Paul Coppens, in 1932 — and that it is “best known from its appearance in the ’39 film No News From The Navy.” The image above appeared on countless blogs when the Significant Project first launched, this past summer; it was quite wrenching to ship the mug up to its new owner!

BONUS: The Country Doctor Mug shown above, which was decorated with a drawing “inspired by Norman Rockwell,” was offered to a few Significant Object participants, but nobody wanted to write a story about it. I grew to loathe the mug, and finally I hurled it into the garbage. Perhaps that was rash — an object that inspired such a strong visceral reaction surely had something to teach me.

These Hawaiian Utensils aren’t particularly serviceable, but they’re the only utensils we’ve got. Stephen Elliott’s narrator bought them in Alaska: “How the utensils migrated their way from those warm pacific islands to the furthest outpost of civilization is beyond my knowing. And when the military men showed up in their snowcats and my wife climbed on the back of one of their vehicles, that was beyond my knowing, too.”

It might be stretching the definition of “dishware” to include this novelty item, yet surely it was fashioned for the purpose of holding beverages. Annalee Newitz’s SF story about the Coconut Cup recounts that it once belonged to a “video celebrity” who “took one of the first cruises to the ‘beach floating in space,’ before the horrible accident that led to today’s atmosphere bubble regulations.”

When Joanne McNeil chose to write about this object, we had no idea what it was — that’s why we named it the Grain Thing. McNeil’s narrator tells us that the Grain Thing is an example of his great-grandfather’s “surrealist craft art,” and that it was inspired by the example of his friend, the artist Joseph Cornell. We’ve since been informed that it’s one of those doohickeys you rest a wooden spoon upon, while cooking.

You can’t drink much out of the Miniature Bottle (really a jug?), nor would you want to once you’ve read Mark Frauenfelder’s story, in which a fellow named Matt steals the bottle from a homeless man — only to discover that the object comes with a terrible curse: “He ran down 5th street, throwing the bottle onto the sidewalk every time it appeared in his mouth.”

You aren’t supposed to eat food from the Kentucky Dish — though it’s probably meant to hold candy, or nuts. Dean Haspiel spins a yarn about adultery and alien abduction, at the end of which the dish (SPOILER ALERT) ends up being smashed. Though in real life, the dish remains intact. Readers might not have found it easy to separate fact from fiction — the object sold for a mere $6.75, which shocked us.

The Penguin Creamer has inspired a certain amount of controversy, but that’s beside the point. Sari Wilson’s narrator notes that she and her ex “treated it with the scornful irony we began to feel for each other,” while her new boyfriend “pours cream from its spout and says, ‘Cute little guy.’”

The Creamer Cow, finally, was abandoned at the Austen Riggs Psychiatric Hospital in Stockbridge, MA, by Norman Rockwell. (See note on Country Doctor Mug, above.) Or so we learn in Lucinda Rosenfeld’s story, whose narrator suggests that the creamer cow has “a pretty angry and unforgiving look on her face.”

NOTE: None of the objects pictured in this post are among this experiment’s Top Ten highest-selling objects. Several figurines made it onto that list, but not one piece of dishware. Do you suppose this trend is a revealing one?

Object No. 60 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Stephen Elliott, has ended. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $4.24.]

I bought these Hawaiian utensils, a wooden spoon and fork, while living in Alaska in the mid-eighties with my first wife. We were living outside the Eskimo village Wales on the western edge of the state, three miles outside of Tin City Air Force Station. The Air Force station was the location of a long-range radar for air surveillance. It was originally built in the 1950s but Reagan gave it a serious upgrade during his successful bid to destabilize the Russians. From the top of a snowdrift you could see boats pulling into ports larger than many football stadiums, carrying steel arms more than a mile in length.

We didn’t think that was any of our concern, though in retrospect it was the most important thing. It was a cold place and a cold time. The wind would whip off the Bering Straight at more than a 100mph and one day in the middle of winter, counting the wind chill, the anemometer read 160 below zero.

I could say we were there to teach English and Christianity to savages, but that wouldn’t get very far towards the truth. And I don’t have the time, or the bandwidth to get into those stories. We got these utensils from the “village younger,” which is what they call the first son of the “village elder,” believe it or not. How the utensils migrated their way from those warm pacific islands to the furthest outpost of civilization is beyond my knowing. And when the military men showed up in their snowcats and my wife climbed on the back of one of their vehicles, that was beyond my knowing, too. At least then.

I will say, I’ve made great use of these little souvenirs. Good for making salad or stirring hot liquids.

Object No. 59 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jen Collins, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $20.50.]

For my 9th birthday, I begged my mother to take me to the iron-on decal store at the Meadow Glen Mall. I had seen some older boy wearing a sweatshirt with a glittery rip-off of the Superman “S” shield saying SUPERBRAT, and I had to have one. By the time I convinced my mother, they had run out of the decal. So I settled for a glitter Garfield on a royal blue pullover hoodie. I was crazy about Garfield — he loved lasagna and hated Mondays, just like me. I had all his books and my friends would come over and read them. This was awesome to a 9-year-old in 1983. I wore the pullover to the arcade, to sleepovers, and to my first track meet.

I wasn’t a Superbrat anyway. I did have a whoopee cushion, though, and a ketchup squirt bottle with a long string in it — both gifts from my father, a wiseass. Naturally, I always picked the 7Up Uncola glass from the kitchen shelf, except for when he picked it first. A few times, when we were watching TV, he stole it from me when I wasn’t looking.

For my 13th birthday — a few days before it — my father left us. A Monday morning. He was packing his briefcase for work while Ma was packing our lunches for school. He came into the TV room, kissed my little sister on the forehead and told her, “Do good today, OK? ABCs?” Then he side-hugged me and said, “See ya latah, Ambah.”

When I got home after track practice that night, my mother told me my father wasn’t coming back. “He left you a present,” she said.

“An abandonment present? Is that customary? No thanks.”

“What can I tell you? He’s an asshole, he’s always been an asshole. At least he remembered this year.” She put a package on the kitchen table, wrapped in newspaper.

It was shaped like an Uncola glass.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Annalee Newitz, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $10.]

At this point most people realize that getting marketers involved in space travel is a bad idea. But fifty years ago, right before the Martian economy collapsed, there was a craze for luxury space cruises to the Belt. Usually that meant a visit to Ceres — dipping into the exotic attractions of Bachelor City — and then a tour of the lesser asteroids along with a drive-by photo op at the mines.

A million little cruise companies started running these things, trying to come up with the most unusual and cunning destinations. Space Beach is the most famous of these, partly because of the scale of what the company did. They took about a teragram of Belt dust that miners and trawlers had collected over the decades, wrapped it an atmosphere bubble, wired it for gravity, geoengineered a quick seaside biosphere, and called it “the only beach floating in space.”

Who wouldn’t want to float in warm water, looking out at a field of stars, with the color-streaked, glowing blob of Jupiter in the distance?

For a while, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing ads for Space Beach or getting swag with their logo on it. Every thrift store in Bachelor City has a few of their coconut cocktail cups, mementos of a time when people still thought coming to the Belt was a naughty adventure. Usually they’re not too expensive, though in another decade that could easily change.

This Space Beach cup is particularly special because it’s in mint condition — it came directly from the estate sale of an old video celebrity who retired to Valles Marineris. She took one of the first cruises to the “beach floating in space,” before the horrible accident that led to today’s atmosphere bubble regulations.

Things may be a lot safer in the Belt now, but you can still revel in nostalgia for a more dangerous, bygone age. Sure, you’d be taking your life in your hands, but wouldn’t it be worth it to bask under sunlamps on a beach made of ancient, pulverized asteroids?

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Dean Haspiel, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $6.75.]

Kentucky reminds me of my first and, probably, only encounter with a friend whom aliens had, supposedly, abducted. In the late 1980s, I co-created and drew a comic book mini-series with a writer who lived in Kentucky. I wanted to draw a sequel and I decided it would be best to knock brainpans face-to-face. So, I saved up some monies and booked a weekend flight to Louisville, where the writer lived at the time with his wife.

He was late in picking me up and, out of boredom, I circled the paltry airport gift shops and was blindsided by the golden light and piercing black eyes from what looked like a stained glass horse trapped inside a porcelain dish. Emblazoned in classy golden letters was the word, “Kentucky.” I had to buy it. However, I couldn’t own it. Not in my house. So, it would become an impromptu house gift.

That first evening, the wife pulled me into the kitchen, and alerted me that aliens had regularly abducted her poor husband. With tears in her eyes and a tremble in her voice she told me that he would go missing for a night, sometimes days, and would come back home deranged and depressed, his mind fried, his body despondent. They weren’t having sex any more and she was worried he would be abducted forever.

What had I walked into? The writer’s depression was soon confirmed when, that night, I discovered him sitting in a chair, alone in another room, facing the wall in the dark. I asked him if he was okay and he told me that his head hurt.

The next day he seemed to be feeling better but said he couldn’t work just yet. So, he took me for a long drive around his stomping grounds and introduced me to a very sexy young woman with dark hair. I don’t remember her name, but let’s call her Janice. Suddenly, my pal was radiating sunrays. He seemed smitten with Janice, but cautious. She was a Philly, a true Kentucky dish. So, I could empathize with the extra skip in his step. But the second Janice was gone, he fell back into a morbid slumber. I was starting to get pissed off, especially since he wasn’t telling me about his cosmic anal probes and instead was moping about like a 12-year old.

He suggested we drive home and try to write. After an hour or so, he looked at me with swollen eyes and told me his head hurt. He walked into his bedroom and shut the door. Like a looming specter, his wife floated over from the kitchen and, after a very long pause, suggested we call Janice over for dinner. She had heard of Janice but never met her and thought a single guy like me might like her. “Sure, why not?” I sighed.

My writer pal appeared at the dinner table, but was incredibly uncomfortable. His wife mollycoddled him while Janice launched a campaign of woo towards me that was so paramount it was a parody. They turned in early — but Janice decided to hang out with me. Talking turned into touching and the natural evolution of two naked people doing what they’re known to do. We rolled around and smashed into something so hard it cracked. It was the Kentucky dish, and it was in pieces.

Janice split early the next morning and my pal stumbled out of his bedroom door in a near coma. His eyelid batted a catatonic wink to acknowledge me as he shuffled into the bathroom. His frightened wife snuck out of their bedroom towards me and whispered that she thought he had been abducted by aliens last night but found him in their closet, standing and staring at wire hangers.

Back home in NYC, I wrote our proposed sequel myself. I never drew it but it broke my cherry to write and draw my own comix. My Kentucky pal would later divorce his wife and write other, great stories that won awards. It was years before it occurred to me that he hadn’t been abducted by aliens at all.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Tom Vanderbilt, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $37. This story was part of a special collaboration with Design Observer, where it was co-published here.]

If he had a personal philosophy, and if such things needed to be articulated, it might be called: the aerodynamics of everyday life. He wanted his surfaces clean, his leading edges freed from drag, he brooked no laggards in his drift. This served him well in his avocation, which, as systems operation manager for a large industrial concern (Imprinteon, a custom-printing operation), involved ensuring that inputs became outputs, with maximum efficiency and at minimum cost. But one would not go awry in ascribing his philosophy to his life outside work, which too bore the requirements of flight: streamlined, rigid, and with no ground attachments.

On this morning, however, headwind. First had come the ink debacle on line 37, as the Pantone 4604, “billowing sail,” rendered so truly on screen, seemed wan in substrate form — more “rippling sheet.” 10,000 college yearbooks were to be pulped. Then were the material flow issues in sector 4, some sort of line imbalance. His throughput was out of sync, and there was no parallel flow, no buffer. The first-pass yields were collapsing. He glared at the faded white sign on the wall: MTBF. Mean time between failures. Its scuffed adjustable wheels were calibrated to read “43.” They would have go to back to 1, tomorrow.

And then the mug. It was placed in front of him, on his padded desk calendar, eclipsing March 3rd. It was a simple thing, really, the sort they ran millions of in a year, being the DOD’s favored insignia contractor. Fortuna Favet Fortibus, it read, Fortune Favors the Strong. The error was so basic, so obvious, that he wondered if there weren’t some hidden layer of complexity at work here. Privately, he allowed that one might read the mug’s form factor in two ways: The wider, curved flare made most sense as the vessel’s egress point, so the lips could comfortably adhere to the contours. And yet in some kind of drink-ware equivalent of a Necker Cube, the brain might willfully invert the mug, so that the wider end could logically seem the stable base, as with the cooling towers of Three Mile Island.

But the lapse he could not comprehend was the handle orientation. For the logo to make sense in this latter configuration, this would have had to have been a right-handed mug; normally, this would make sense, but the 3rd Marine 8th battalion had a long-standing, obscure joke, which some colonel must have dreamt up years ago when this long-standing order was first requisitioned, that the 8th battalion liked to “drink with their left, and shoot with their right.”

As it was, it could have been worse. The flaw was found in an acceptance sample (it was a retrograde technique, but he was working on a refinement that he would debut at next year’s Logistics World) run about two hours, or 3000 mugs, into the lot. And here was one of those moments where he felt the keen sense of being at the center of things, of life in its great rushing cavalcade of risk and reward. Was the sample he had pulled a statistical aberration — one upturned mug among tens of thousands of mugs of proper disposition — or was it endemic of a system failure, a thorough corruption? Was he about to pull the plug on an otherwise stable process?

His assistant called out, the inspector was here. He put the mug in a file drawer to his left, and would later move it to a cabinet that he considered his own museum of error. “Have a seat,” he said, closing the drawer.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Adam Harrison Levy, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $15.50. This story was part of a special collaboration with Design Observer, where it is co-published here.]

Now that Budd Schulberg has died, the story of how I stole this plate from him can finally be told. I was researching a documentary film and I had taken a bus out to his house on Long Island in order to interview him. Schulberg wrote the screenplay for On The Waterfront (“I coulda been a contender”), named names for the House Un-American Activities Committee and, during World War Two, arrested Leni Riefenstahl, the famous filmmaker. Not many people know that.

In my capacity working on documentary films, I’ve met a lot of famous people and stolen great stuff from them — Harry Belafonte’s precise V5 roller ball pen, Liza Minnelli’s ashtray, and a used Kleenex from Debbie Harry’s red leather handbag. Some people collect autographs from famous people. I collect things.

These things represent the defining moments of my life. By stealing objects from people whose lives have been important, I celebrate my encounter with them (at least that is what I tell myself in order to explain what otherwise might be termed theft). A Kleenex is a Kleenex (even when smeared with lipstick) but when its Debbie Harry’s Kleenex, it becomes truly important, and it gains even more importance when it joins Belafonte’s pen and Minnelli’s ashtray in my collection. Right?

So it was a crisp fall afternoon and I had taken the Hamptons Jitney out to see Schulberg, who lives near the ocean. He picked me up in his car. He was ninety-two at the time, and his head just about cleared the dashboard. We made it back to his house more or less in one piece.

We sat down in his living room, which was a jumble of really great stuff. On the mantelpiece was his Oscar for On The Waterfront (patina chipped and damaged and way too obvious to steal), a signed photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald (framed and therefore too clunky), and a number of seashells (too cute).

I asked Schulberg questions about his life. During World War Two, he had been a member of John Ford’s film unit. His mission was to find and edit Nazi film footage to be used during the Nuremberg Trials. It was the first time that film was used as evidence in an International Court of Law. I was impressed. My own work demands that I view video clips on YouTube.

While he was talking, I spied the plate — which contained some loose change and three paperclips — on the credenza. Something about the simplicity and modernity of its shape reminded me of an Eero Saarinen Tulip Table. The artfully incoherent placement of the stars was like a Dada backdrop. The plate was clearly mass-produced. It called out to me. When Schulberg doddered off to take a leak, I slipped the plate — change, paperclips, and all — into my bag.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sarah Rainone, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $41.]

As my husband and I were driving back to New York after my mother’s funeral, I spotted a general store on the Rhode Island-Connecticut border, the kind that exist solely for those who forgot to bring something back from Newport or Block Island or Martha’s Vineyard or wherever. Judging from the weathered sign and the rusting trinkets out front, it seemed decades old, and yet I swear I had never seen it in all my travels along this stretch of I-95. Strange.

My husband looked puzzled as I pulled into the gravel driveway. “I have to go in.” He started to open his door but I stopped him. “And I have to go alone.” I was not in the store two minutes when I saw the plate. Let me explain.

After my mother became ill, I traveled to India in search of the secrets of eternal life. While my studies proved inadequate to save her, I learned a bit about yogic chanting, namely that the sweetest chants are the ones sung to Krishna — the mischievous youth who liked butter, enjoyed hanging out with female cowherds, and who just happened to be the human incarnation of the great god Vishnu, tasked with no less a chore than the preservation of the entire universe.

When I returned to the States with my newfound knowledge, my mother said she appreciated it, but I think she was humoring me. She was Irish Catholic and didn’t see the sense in taking off to India when the Holy Spirit was everywhere.

When I saw this plate, I knew there was something about it that was both Indian and Irish, something that transcended the religions that divide nations and men. I bought it immediately and would later discover that much like St. Patrick who had driven the snakes from Ireland, Krishna had tamed the serpent Kaliya who had previously been poisoning the waters of the Yamuna river, killing the cowherds on its banks. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

This plate is about cowherds, about shamrocks, about Ireland, yes, but it is also about liberation, about preservation, about eternal life. And if you purchase it, my only wish is that you do not eat corned beef from it, without first thinking of Krishna.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ben Greenman, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $32.08.]

This object is best known from its appearance in the 1939 film No News From The Navy, a comedy starring James Wilton as a hapless midshipman who cannot set aside his seafaring ways, even when he is confined to dry land as a result of an injury.  Wilton’s character (who is called, simply, “Sailor”) competes for the affection of a young woman named Evelyn (Mary Hannan) despite the opposition of her father (Gordon Howard) and a larger, determined suitor (Kenneth Lopp). The film is a second-tier comedy, but there is one classic scene in which Sailor shaves before taking Evelyn out on a date. He is clearly accustomed to shaving aboard his ship, and as a result, he is constantly attempting to regain his balance, despite the fact the floor is level and stable. The critic Leonard Folsom has written that “The unheralded Wilton has a scene that combines the physical complexity of a Chaplin solo with close-ups of inexpressive expression that rival the finest moments of Keaton.” At the beginning of that scene, Wilton uses this smiling mug as his shaving mug, and while he sets it on the shelf above the washbasin midway through, it remains, as Folsom writes, “an oddly compelling focus of the film so long as it is onscreen, enormous in its diminutive size, menacing in its cheer.”

There are other shaving mugs that resemble this one, but none was created as this one was: by hand, with the assistance of a kiln, by a famous surrealist sculptor. This one was. In fact, it was wheel-thrown and fired by the Belgian artist Paul Coppens in 1932; Coppens, of course, was part of the group of artists supported by the patronage of Edward James. “I have dreamed of a smiling shaving mug,” Coppens wrote to James in June 1932. “A sketch is attached. It looks like a face, of course, because a face is the only thing that is capable of smiling (or is it?), but it also looks like a tooth, because a tooth is the only thing that is capable of showing when a face is smiling. In addition, I have noticed that daily washing rituals, including shaving, are illogically equated with the whiteness of teeth. But there is more to the image. Look at the handle. It functions like an ear visually, but as there is only one, this figure is incapable of ‘smiling ear-to-ear,’ as the idiom has it. In addition, I have recently learned that ‘mug’ is a slang term for the human face in some parts of the English-speaking world. (Ironically, this practice comes from the fact that beer steins were fashioned in the human image, and unattractive specimens of our race were said be ‘mug-faces.’)” Coppens’ piece, which he called Tooth Fils (the wordplay refers both to dentistry and to its small size), was part of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936.

How Tooth Fils came to be in No News From the Navy is simpler than the creation of either work. James Wilton, who himself trained as a painter and considered himself an acolyte of, if not a participant in, Surrealism, attended the exhibit, acquired it, and insisted that it be in every one of his films. As there was only one film, this is a condition that history has found easy to satisfy.