Woman Fails to Auction Off Her Quirky Collection

Some auction items are hot. The gold bikini Carrie Fisher wore as Princess Leia fetched $175,000 on Friday, for instance. But some auction items are not. In the "not" camp comes a new quirky entry: an English woman's collection of bedpans. Mary Jacobs, 77, of Newmarket, England, spent 40 years building her cache of 163 bedpans, a collection that has grown so large she says she had a cupboard built to store them in a front bedroom, reports UPI. But she felt like it was time for them to go and turned to Batemans, which divided the collection into 17 lots containing six to 12 bed pans each and tried to auction them off on July 6.

But the auction house didn't have any luck unloading them, despite the fact that, as Jacobs says, "they're clean, washed and in fantastic condition." As for how Jacobs got her start hunting out bedpans, she tells Suffolk News she was helping a Salvation Army location with its rummage sales in 1984 when "I saw a slipper bedpan come in and I bought it for 50p and that was the start, I just wanted to collect something different. It snowballed from there and I found myself going round so many places to add to my collection." (More strange stuff stories.)