Collectors live among us–everywhere–whether they’re interested in bicycles or … in Napoleon’s wedding tackle.

That’s according to the New York Times, which was once ringside for the story of the men who are arguably New York’s most famous collectors, the Collyer brothers.

Now, we have the story of Evan Lattimer, whose father, the late urologist Dr. John Lattimer, amassed a broad-based collection of cultural artifacts reportedly ranging from one of W.C. Fields’ cigars to a bloodstained collar that Abraham Lincoln wore the night he was shot, to … a severed penis which may or may not have belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Evan Lattimer, the Times reports, is in the process of cataloging her late father’s collection and, at some point, auctioning portions of it to pay the inheritance taxes.

“By way of example, she recalled several history lessons inspired by artifacts like Lee Harvey Oswald’s letters,” Times reporters Kassie Bracken and Erik Olsen write. “When the siblings were adolescents in the 1960s, she said, ‘he’d put us at the correct distance and angle’ to fire a rifle at a cadaver from the barn roof, to demonstrate the lone gunman theory, she said. ‘He’d say, ‘Well, there’s your target, see how you do,’ and we could do it when we were kids!’ ”

The late Dr. John Lattimer, described as a prominent urologist at Columbia University, also had a historian’s luck of serving as a medical officer at the Nuremberg war tribunals.

Somewhat later, he was chairman of the University’s urology department when “the Kennedy family asked Dr. Lattimer to examine X-rays, photographs and other materials from John F. Kennedy’s autopsy,” the Times reports.

“His conclusion that Oswald was the sole shooter was front-page news, and his research stimulated a burst of collecting that included the acquisition of a brick from the Texas School Book Depository, a swatch of leather from Kennedy’s car in Dallas and Lee Harvey Oswald’s letters to his mother and Marine Corps target-practice score book.”

Then there’s the tale of Toronto bicycle store proprietor Igor Kenk (a name with a ring to it). Times reporter Ian Austen wonders in his lede, “What exactly was he planning to do with 2,865 bicycles?”

According to the Times, 2,396 of the velocipedes recovered from Kenk’s shop were “bicycles that police say Mr. Kenk either stole or arranged to have stolen.”

“The jumbled collection of bicycles suggests that Mr. Kenk is the unofficial world champion of bicycle thieves,” Austen writes. “But as he awaits trial next month on 58 charges related to theft and drug possession, the biggest mysteries of all are Mr. Kenk’s motives and his ultimate plan for the armada of steel, rubber and aluminum he amassed.”

One theory, the Times reveals, is that Kenk, who holds a scrap metal dealer’s license, “was playing the commodities markets, waiting for another spike in metals prices before melting down the bicycles.”

We’ll leave you with this: at one point during the Toronto police investigation, Kenk’s building “was so crammed with bicycles and bike parts that a Fire Department rescue squad had to remove the upper-floor windows and lower the bicycles by rope.”

Tags: California, Collyer brothers, Columbia University, commodities markets, Dallas, Dr. John Lattimer, Erik Olsen, Evan Lattimer, Ian Austen, Igor Kenk, John F. Kennedy, Kassie Bracken, Kennedy family, Lee Harvey Oswald, Long Beach, Napoleon Bonaparte, new york times, Nuremberg war tribunals, President Abraham Lincoln, Southern California, Texas School Book Depository, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas, Toronto, W.C. Fields