The shelves at Room 100, Abrams Planetarium — the physical wing of a collection that started as an office joke.
A one-man (now one-office) museum of vintage moist-towelette packaging, cataloguing more than 1,000 pieces — Lufthansa, KFC, British Airways, a Star Trek tie-in captioned “Live long and prosper!” — with the earnestness of a real institution, because at Michigan State University, it is one.
John French started collecting moist towelettes in the 1990s, while working at planetariums in Pennsylvania and Texas. At a planetarium conference, he put his stash in an empty display case, called it the Moist Towelette Museum on a whim, and it became the hit of the show. When he moved to Michigan State’s Abrams Planetarium in 2002, the collection came with him, and it’s been growing ever since — donated by colleagues, conference-goers, and strangers who heard about it and mailed one in. It now runs to more than 1,000 towelettes from every continent but Antarctica, cheerfully catalogued online at moisttowelettemuseum.com.
The site is the joke played completely straight: rows of scanned packets, brand by brand, no captions beyond what’s printed on the foil. Lufthansa, KFC, British Airways, Sheetz, Red Lobster, Polident, a hand-cleaner packet branded MammoWipe, and a pair of Star Trek cleansing towelettes — “They’re wet Jim!” and “Live long and prosper!” — sit next to a used one mailed in by Tom and Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk. The oldest piece in the collection, a “Wash Up!” packet, dates to 1963, just a few years after the modern moist towelette was invented. The site even preserves a DIY recipe — witch hazel, glycerine, and 24 squares of white paper towel — for anyone who runs out and can’t wait for a donation to arrive.
The honest note: French has since retired from the planetarium and now holds the title curator emeritus. The museum itself survives because his successor as production coordinator, Aspen Folse, chose to keep the display case in the office rather than clear it out — a small, specific act of institutional kindness that’s arguably the best part of the story. The physical museum (Room 100, Tuesday through Friday, best to call ahead — it’s still someone’s desk) and the website both still get real, if unhurried, upkeep; the site’s own footer notes its last update was March 2024. Nothing here is slick. That’s rather the point: a collection this specific survives only because enough people, one office at a time, decided it was worth keeping.