Some presents are harder than a birthday. The friend who is cooking for you on Saturday. The colleague who is leaving after six years. You want to spend enough to show you thought about it, and not so much that it becomes awkward.
Museum shops are good at exactly this range. The object comes with a story attached, a painting, a building or a 500-million-year-old animal, so you have something to say when you hand it over.
We picked 14 gifts from 10 museum shops, each between about $25 and $50, and grouped them by who they are for. Prices from Canada, Britain and Denmark are converted to dollars, so the $50 line is approximate there, and shipping is extra everywhere.
Things for the table, for the person who already has enough wine.
A porcelain teapot inspired by the curves of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim, the spiral that opened on Fifth Avenue in 1959. The body measures about 6 by 6.5 inches, it comes gift boxed, and the shop lists it as microwave and dishwasher safe. The page does not state how much it holds.
Two linen napkins with cotton edging, 18 inches square, designed for SFMOMA by the artist Tucker Nichols and sold only there. They are called Suggested Topics of Conversation, which is a kind thing to bring to somebody's dinner party.
Four coasters, each with a different detail of the Hartwell Memorial Window, the leaded-glass landscape that Tiffany Studios made in 1917 and that now belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago. They are absorbent stone with cork underneath, a little over 4 inches square.
LACMA owns an entire reception room from a house in Damascus, built in 1766 and 1767. This linen tea towel, about 28 by 20 inches, takes a detail from it: a slice of watermelon on a plate. Made by Third Drawer Down for the museum and gift packaged. Cold wash only.
Anna Atkins, a nineteenth-century English botanist, laid plants on light-sensitive paper and let the sun print them white on Prussian blue. This apron borrows one of her cyanotypes. Organic linen, 33 by 27 inches, with a front pocket, made in Lithuania. Warm wash, hang dry.
Nothing to do with modern art, and very Scandinavian. A handmade mushroom knife from the Swedish workshop Iris Hantverk: a birch handle about 19.5 cm long, under 8 inches, with a soft brush at the other end for cleaning what you find. For the cook who also owns boots.
Three objects for a colleague, a new graduate, or anyone who spends the day looking at a screen and would like something else to look at.
Romans passed small skeletons around at banquets as a reminder to enjoy life while it lasted. The Getty Villa has a bronze one from the first century, and this is its reproduction: aluminum alloy with a hand-applied patina, 3.5 inches tall, with a metal stand and a gift box.
The American Museum of Natural History is the one with the 94-foot blue whale hanging from the ceiling. This one is 8 inches long, in gilded resin on a black stand, and arrives boxed for giving. A desk ornament for the colleague who would be embarrassed by a dinosaur.
Corita Kent, the nun and Pop artist, wrote ten rules for her art students at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Rule 4: consider everything an experiment. Here they are on a 6 by 9 inch ceramic tile made in Southern California by Bauer Pottery, with felt pads underneath.
Gustave Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) is a very large painting of people holding umbrellas, and one of the best-known works in the Art Institute of Chicago. Putting it on an umbrella was inevitable. It folds to 11 inches, opens to 36, and opens and closes with a button.
A natural cotton canvas tote, made in the USA, printed with Edward Hopper's Study for Williamsburg Bridge (1928) in the lettering of the Whitney's Hopper's New York exhibition. It measures 13.75 by 13 inches with 12-inch straps and has a deep pocket inside.
All three come from natural history and science museums, which have always understood children better than art museums do.
Flying Scotsman, built in 1923 and now in the collection of the National Railway Museum in York, as a soft toy: apple green, numbered 4472, about 50 cm long, 100% polyester and listed for ages 0 and up. The shop notes it cannot currently ship to Northern Ireland.
An 8-inch plush of Greenops boothi, a trilobite from the Devonian period, from the Paleo Pals series at the Royal Ontario Museum's shop. Trilobites crawled along shallow sea floors for around 300 million years, which is a good run.
Three real fossils, a shark tooth, an orthoceras and an ammonite, each about 1.5 inches long. They sit between clear layers in a black 3.5 by 7 inch case that opens if someone needs to hold them, and it comes with detachable feet. No age guidance on the page; best for a child old enough to own a shelf.
We read the public catalogs of the museum shops. Nobody paid to be on this list, and no brand sent us samples: we have not handled these items ourselves. Sizes and materials come from each shop's own product page, which is also where you buy.
Prices can change and items sell out. If a pick goes above $50 or is no longer listed by its shop, it drops off this page.
Want more? Browse every museum gift under $50, raise the ceiling to under $100, or go smaller with our guide to museum gifts under $25.