Priceless

SURELY you have at least one: a cherished photo or childhood toy, packed through endless moves. Maybe it has an honored place in your home, or maybe it’s a talisman kept close in purse or pocket for luck. I still have a diner-style plate from a long-gone nightclub and a tasseled red fez that was dragged across Egypt.

Why do certain things charm us so? In their new book, “Taking Things Seriously”(Princeton Architectural Press: 176 pp., $17.50 paper), Boston Globe columnist Joshua Glenn and designer Carol Hayes delve into this “human drive and capacity to invest inanimate objects with meaning.” They asked artists, designers, writers and thinkers to contribute photos of their precious belongings and explain their significance.

The result is a wonderfully eccentric collection of “things” and thought-provoking essays that underscore French philosopher Bruno Latour’s challenge to regard objects as more than merely matters of fact but, Glenn writes in his introduction, as “an association, a network, a gathering” of meaning and ideas.

Consider the power that a pile of red dirt still has over Sierra magazine writer Marilyn Berlin Snell many years after she scooped it up outside a Navajo tepee in Arizona. “I took it to remind me what I’m made of,” she writes. Salon.com columnist Patrick Smith’s two ceramic pegs, cylinders from an electrified fence at Birkenau, are grimly evocative of those who died at the Nazi concentration camp in Poland.

And there’s the whimsical petrified bagel that ‘zine creator and Christopher Walken fan John F. Kelly treasures from Robert De Niro’s TriBakery restaurant. A friend was about to send the scorched bun back until she realized it had been made by the sheepish-looking guy in the kitchen -- an apron-clad Walken.

Perhaps illustrator Kelly Blair best explains what drives us. On her bathroom sink, she keeps a quarter-inch-long pine cone found during a hike through an upstate New York woods: “I look at it every morning while I brush my teeth. It makes me happy.”

-- Kristina Lindgren