Christmas came early for Matt this year; while foraging at the flea market on Sunday he found a vintage appliance that’s been at the top of his wish list for years: the Toast-o-Lator. It’s a bakelite-based beauty from the forties with art deco curves and a way of making toast that is truly the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Here’s how it works: you simply insert a piece of bread into the slot on one side of this sleek, Rube Goldberg-like appliance, flick a bakelite switch, and then watch, through a porthole, as an escalator-like mechanism slowly carries the bread past hot, glowing coils to the other side where it tumbles out, transformed from a humble piece of bread to a specimen of golden perfection.