Michale Ravnitsky recently invited members of the Archives Listserve to confess the most unusual object or artifact in their repositories. The many interesting responses included the following:

- A murderer's ashes (National Library of Australia)

- Business records of a local patent medicine company that claimed their formulas and business directions were given to them through automatic handwriting in seances of the directors (Dean DeBolt, West Florida Archives)

- A portion of an elephant's toenail, and a 19th century circus wagon wheel (the toenail is bagged and cataloged as part of a circus collection, the wheel is in remote storage). Also a collection of ceremonial/whimsical gavels used by the presidents of the local chapter of the American Chemical Society: everything from carved (human?) bone to plastic pill bottles (full) attached to handles (Ed Frank, Mississippi Valley Collection)

- Hitler's phone from the bunker--reliable provenance. (Bobs Tusa, Univ. of Southern Miss.)

- A dozen anal polyps in plastic, and a family of dead mice on sticks, from a geneticist at Utah State University. Great conversation pieces! (Roy Webb, University of Utah).

- Many years ago when I was working with the Allied Military Government in Italy records from WW II, I had to send a couple of documents to the conservation lab because they were stuck together by a condom - presumably used. The records also contained lists of prostitutes from known brothels who were treated for venereal diseases. They had names, addresses, and ages (ranging from 9 years to 60 years of age). (Jennie Guilbaud, NARA)

- A skeleton with organs attached (filled with latex or some other substance) of a small child used as a teaching model in the late 1800's. Also the ashes of a man is on loan to the Anatomy Department. (Sebrina Mabe, Dorothy Carpenter Medical Archives )

- Menstrual items, belts and cloths, of the late 19th and early 20th century. (Debra Westerman, Florida Park Service)

- Documents from the 1857 divorce case file of John F. Rague, architect of the old State Capitol Building in Springfield, Illinois and Iowa City. The evidence included shredded notes his mistress wrote to him (apparently Rague met her on Sundays, after church), which someone carefully re-assembled and pasted back together. Mrs. Rague's suit was successful. (Thomas Wood, University of Illinois at Springfield)

- A former archivist lost portions of his left-hand's middle and ring fingers when he was a young man working in a print shop. He kept the fingertips in a small, green glass jar and formaldehyde. Over the years the liquid evaporated and its stubs mummified. During his earlier tenure as an English professor, he kept the jar in a desk drawer and brought it out now and then to unnerve the students. When he died the jar and its stubs were among his papers. In the course of processing these items, my immediate predecessor--being a religious man, former missionary, seminary professor, and someone with a sense of humor--decided to create a separation record and keep the jar in his desk drawer. It was, he explained, his own "early warning system." If he heard tinkling in the jar he knew that the stubs were about to be reunited with their original owner and that other, quite awesome, things were about to happen. The fingers are still in my desk drawer, although they were once "fingernapped" and held for ransom by some overwrought seminarians. I refused to pay, and the fingers were eventually returned, unharmed. If you want to know more you can "read more about it" in an article entitled "Giving 'Em the Fingers: or Two Thumbs Up for a Covenant Reliquary." (Timothy J. Johnson, North Park University)

- Not in my collection, but....one of the better known artifacts is the "Auto-Icon" of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, which consists of "Bentham's preserved skeleton, dressed in his own clothes, and surmounted by a wax head. Bentham requested that his body be preserved in this way in his will made shortly before his death on 6 June 1832. Since 1850 it has been displayed in a glass cabinet at University College London, where Bentham's papers are housed. You can see a picture of the Auto-Icon, an excerpt from the will, and lots more, on the web at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/jb.htm (Mike Widener, U.T. - Austin)

- The Western Jewish History Center in Berkeley has a slice of wedding cake from 1902. The cake has been in the archives for 25 years, shows no sign of further deterioration, and has not attracted any vermin (which is more than one can say for some paper collections) (Laura O'Hara, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center)

- We declined the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transfer a group of Objects Removed from the Stomachs and Intestines of Patients in the State Mental Hospital that were offered to the State Archives a few years ago. (Lydia Lucas, Minnesota Historical Society)

Page 9, Spring 1998 Newsletter