In an office at MSU, a museum of moist towelettes

EAST LANSING –

The Moist Towelette Museum occupies two bookshelves in the office of John French in the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University.

It is perhaps the university's least-visited museum, drawing only a visitor or two each year, but it is doubtless one of the premium moist towelette collections in the state. Perhaps the world.

"We've got some from the Hard Rock Café in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur," said French, holding up the unopened packets. "I wish I had been to all the places these moist towelettes have been. I'm not nearly as traveled as they are."

He reached for a towelette in a pink wrapper with the catchphrase "The secretary's hand cleaner."

"I always really enjoy this Finger Pinkies," he said. "If you look at the back of it, it says, 'Also an ideal companion around the house.'"

French, a genial man in his early 50s, is the planetarium's production coordinator. He began collecting moist towelettes two decades ago for reasons he can't quite articulate.

"It must be something about being human," he said. "You just have a tendency to want to collect stuff, whether it's like my coworker here who collects Pez candy dispensers or my other colleague here who collects garden gnomes."

"I just ended up collecting moist towelettes," he said, "and it has really grown beyond expectations."

Grown, that is, to somewhere in neighborhood of 1,000 towelettes from from a Turkish Shell station, Quaker Steak & Lube in Sharon, Pennsylvania, the U.S. Embassy in Sweden and points in between. The oldest piece in the collection is a Wash Up Towelette dated 1963. The oddest are likely Star Trek towelettes from the series' original run.

The collection has been built up mostly through donations, from colleagues at other planetariums around the country, from strangers who have been seen the museum's website, from other collectors.

Because, yes, there are other collectors. French has swapped towelettes with a man in Israel. A few years back, a boy who collected moist towelettes drove with his father from Chicago just to see the museum.

The the only piece in the celebrity wing of the museum is also the only unwrapped towelette in the collection, one used by Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of public radio program Car Talk.

"I actually sent them an e-mail and said, 'Hey do you have any moist towelettes that you'd like to donate to the museum?' not knowing that they'd give me a used one," French said.

He flirted with the idea of asking other celebrities for used towelettes, he said, "but I thought that might be a little weird."

Shannon Schmoll, the director of the planetarium, doesn't mind sharing space with the museum. It's an interesting project, she said, a cute quirk. She's come to know the collection well enough to have favorite pieces, the Magliozzi towelette among them.

"That's how he broke the news to me that Tom Magliozzi had died," she said. "He said, 'Do you want to touch it?'"

On the web

www.moisttowelettemuseum.com