These Collectors Have a Hand in Cookie Jars : Hobbies: Perhaps it stems from nostalgia, but the passion for the containers fuels newsletters, networks and auctions.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thy pudgy mustached face. I love thy roly-poly shape and thy smooth glazed surface. I love thy three chocolate doughnuts ‘round thy waist.

That’s what Steffi Berne thought about the cookie jar she bought eight years ago, a doughnut chef with a baker’s face on top and tempting doughnuts on the bottom.

“My family thought I was nuts. They couldn’t understand my enthusiasm,” Berne said.

Of course, that was before she had amassed 200 jars, before she found a cookie jar aficionado for a pen pal, before she knew the difference between chef-shaped jars manufactured by McCoy and Red Wing (all face-no body; fat body-tiny head, respectively), and before clunky kitschy cookie jars caught on around the country. And well before her passion for collecting them led her to write the new book “The Cookie Jar Cookbook.”

“There’s a whole underground cookie jar movement out there,” Berne said. “There’s one woman in Maine who sells nothing but mismatched tops and bottoms. There’s a reunion in Zanesville, Ohio, every summer where people from all over the country come to trade their jars. There are newsletters where people advertise ‘rewards’ for jars.”

There also are nationwide contests for the cutest cookie jars and opportunities to buy new ones through mail and phone auctions. When serious collectors run out of room in their kitchen, they store the jars (usually 9 to 12 inches high) in closets and bedrooms. One collector in the Midwest even lined his bathroom walls with cookie jars.

Berne refers to having her hand in the cookie-jar hobby as her “other life,” but it is not as unconventional as it used to be. The turning point--as most collectors see it--was “the Warhol thing.”

In 1988, Sotheby’s auctioned off Andy Warhol’s belongings, including 175 cookie jars. The New York auction house estimated they would fetch $7,000.

“I talked to antique dealers about the value of the jars and decided I would double that or--if the bidding got really heated--triple it,” said Berne, who hoped to buy at least one of the lots. “I practiced how I would wheel and deal and bid.”

She never even got the chance to raise her paddle. When the hysteria subsided, the collection had gone for $247,830. “It was incredible,” Berne said. “The jars had captured everyone’s imagination.”

Warhol and the auction made cookie jars respectable and lent them a cachet to endure beyond their 15 minutes of fame in the collectibles annals. “Most of Warhol’s jars were fairly common. The only exceptional thing about them was the fact that he owned them,” said Richard Olstad, the manager of Kaleidoscope Antiques in Manhattan, which stocks about 1,500 jars.

Nonetheless, prices soared. Rare jars (mint condition, limited editions) that would have cost $100 in the mid-1980s, now sell for more than $1,000. The dramatic appreciation in value is especially surprising when you consider that when the jars were first produced, in the 1940s and ‘50s, they sold for as little as $2.99. Many were manufactured and stamped by Midwestern potteries that are now defunct, such as McCoy, Brush, Abingdon, Regal China and Shawnee. Some were made in Japan and had paper labels affixed to the bottom, which have since fallen off. And others were handmade by individual potters across the United States.

Some people are quite specific about what they collect--focusing exclusively on jars trimmed in gold that were manufactured by Shawnee or jars with nursery rhyme themes or black jars depicting plump southern mammies wearing aprons and kerchiefs.

“What’s valuable today is anything unusual,” said Berne, pointing out several “flasher” jars that line the shelves of her Manhattan kitchen. (The eyes on the jar appear to flash open and closed when you move from side to side, as if you are viewing an old-fashioned hologram.)

Even newer cookie jars are in demand. “Collectors are buying jars made in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Berne said. “I just bought one that was made last year--a cookie jar from the film ‘The Rocketeer,’ which is a replica of the Bulldog Cafe in the movie.”

Why this passion for heavy unwieldy containers that are part cutesy-pie, part camp? Perhaps Americans are nostalgic for the 1950s, when moms modeled themselves after Donna Reed, with plates of fresh-baked cookies and glasses of cold milk for the kids after school.

“It was the last period of made-in-America, hand-painted pottery, and I think some people are nostalgic for that period,” said Joyce Settle, a New York dealer and collector.

Settle collects cookie jars shaped like earthy, peasant women. “They’re so ugly that they’re adorable,” she said, with a logic that most jar aficionados would appreciate.

George Williams, who writes articles on cookie jars for a newsletter called “Our McCoy Matters,” is planning to move to a bigger house because his home in Charlotte, N.C., is too small to house the 900 jars he has purchased in the last six years.

Of course, Williams does not use the cookie jars. Most collectors would rather part with the ceramic containers than fill them with crumbly chocolate chips or gooey brownies.

“Use them? You’ve got to be kidding,” said collector Tom Annunziato. “The kids could break the lids or get them dirty or chip the paint. I don’t really believe they were ever made for cookies.”