Design Love: small appliances

image from here

It's been a hectic week or so - sorry that posting has been non-existent.
Over the weekend I joined in on our neighborhood's semi-annual multi-family yard sale. Those things are much more fun to go to than to set up and actually do! Over all, I made a little money, but it was a day where items over a dollar did not move out. I put out a few items that I was ambivalent about selling, so they were priced...higher than a buck. I still have 'em.

Thank heavens for the kindness of strangers, though, because one interesting guy in a Hawaiian shirt told me in so many words that one particular item on my table could be worth a whole lot more than the $5 tag I had on it.

At the last minute I had thrown this vintage toaster in with my other yard sale goodies. I got it years ago, probably at another yard sale, and promptly put it in a cabinet. Somehow the cloth cord seemed like a bad combo with the geriatric wiring in my house.
So, a little internet searching a few days later, and it looks like I have a Knapp-Monarch toaster, probably from the 1930's. With the rounded edges and the stepped design on the ends, it definitley has a Deco vibe to it. The levers may be black bakelite, I'm not sure.

I haven't run across this exact model in my sleuthing, but I did stumble upon a collecting niche I never knew existed. There is a very devoted group of collectors of small appliances, and the industrial design of such things, out there, and this site is one of the most fun that I ran discovered: Vintage Toasters Blog.

It's a pretty straight forward site; they have vintage toasters, and the toasters are for sale. BUT, once you start looking you realize these folks have a lot of toasters. In fact, there are more than 30 group photos of toasters, and each group has at least five toasters. They have lovely toasters like this:

And there are a few shots that fall in the 'Old and Rusty ' category, like this:
Don't you love the painting (poster?) of toast next to the toasters?!
The best, though, is realizing that in the background of several photos, you can see lots of plastic storage bins, and you just know that they're probably full of more toasters! That's my kind of people.

If you just have to have your toast come from a stylish appliance, check out these other sources for retro toasters:
Toaster Central
The Toaster Art Gallery
The Cyber Toaster Museum