Toy Toaster

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jonathan Goldstein, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $6.25.] Twenty years after the man’s death, I still can’t rightly say whether my uncle Dwayne was a benevolent old-timey Grandpa Walton … Continue reading

Toy Hot Dog

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jenny Davidson, has ended. Original price: 12 cents. Final price: $3.58.] I blame it on the book: a pocket-sized lined notebook with a black matte cover, bound at the left-hand margin … Continue reading

Mule Figurine

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Matthew Sharpe, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $14.50.] This is the statue of the mule that I have sculpted by my hands, but if you are the serious person … Continue reading

Smiling Mug

[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 … Continue reading

Miniature Bottle

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story Mark Frauenfelder, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $23.] Matt saw the tiny blue bottle on the third step of the main entrance to the Los Angeles Central Library. It was … Continue reading

Chili Cat

[The bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Lydia Millet, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $22.72.] I went with my friend G to her great aunt’s house a few weeks after the aunt passed away. G … Continue reading

Candyland labyrinth game

[The bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Matthew Battles, has ended. Original price: 29 cents. Final price: $11.50.] You had passed him at the entrance to the subway station countless times before, not so much sitting as thrown … Continue reading

JFK Bust

[Bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Annie Nocenti, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $26.] I’m long off the vine. Eighty, truth be told. I refuse to be one of those biddies that dies with clutter. Found … Continue reading

Creamer Cow

[Bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Lucinda Rosenfeld, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $26.] My grandmother, Zippy Friedman, was an administrator at Austen Riggs Psychiatric Hospital in Stockbridge, MA, for several decades beginning in the 1950s. … Continue reading

Sanka Ashtray

[Bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Luc Sante, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $17.79.] Only now do I feel free to tell my part in the theft of the famed Light of the East diamond from … Continue reading