WHAT CONDITION THE CONDITION IS IN: AS IS. Not film tested. This Baby Brownie has a bit of corrosion on the viewfinder, as shown in the photo. Otherwise it's in surprisingly good shape.Scroll down to learn why this camera thinks it’s remarkable. Spoiler: it has a point.

The Baby Brownie is what the Depression produced when it briefly paused from ruining everything to offer ordinary people the gift of memory. It's four million units of ribbed Bakelite proove that someone, somewhere, thought the huddled masses deserved a hobby.

Walter Dorwin Teague's* 1934 ribbed Bakelite shell isn't just a design choice; it's a philosophy. It’s the belief that beauty and austerity aren't mutually exclusive, and that a camera costing less than a good meal could still have the dignity of architecture.

It weighs less than a decent flask and asks nothing of your intellect. It features a fixed aperture, a fixed shutter, and a meniscus lens so imperfect they had to bend the film track to accommodate its failings. We'll admit, that's a more elegant solution than most of us manage with our own.

There's no double-exposure lock, because the camera extends you a trust you probably haven't earned. The Bakelite can get brittle with age, especially at the latch, as if the camera's slowly relinquishing its grip on this world. But that winding knob still clicks with the loud, satisfying ratchet of a thing that knows what it is.

It darkens the corners of every frame it touches. Call it a flaw if you must, but we call it editorial. It never bothered to have a serial number, which makes four million of them anonymous as regret and twice as persistent. You can keep the camera clicking by purchasing boutique 127 film from specialty manufacturers, adapting standard 35mm rolls for a lo-fi "sprocket hole" look, or manually trimming and re-spooling 120 film to fit the original 46mm dimensions.

*Walter Dorwin Teague was the man Kodak hired in 1928 when they realized that making cameras look like plumbing fixtures was, commercially speaking, a limitation. He was one of the first "consultant designers" summoned by a major corporation, which is to say, the first person paid handsomely to tell engineers that beauty exists. His Art Deco sensibilities and Machine Age aerodynamics produced the Vanity Kodaks, the Bantam Special, and the Baby Brownie. In doing so, he proved that the American public would buy almost anything, provided it had sufficiently pleasing geometry.