WHAT CONDITION THE CONDITION IS IN: AS IS. Not film tested. This Kodak Brownie Holiday Flash is in remarkably good condition for its age. Perfect candidate for display, maybe even shooting. Scroll down to learn why this camera thinks it’s remarkable. Spoiler: it has a point.

In a suburban home in Scarborough, sometime around 1958, a mother pointed a small black box at her children and pressed a button. For around 1/50th of a second, the room held still. The Kodak Brownie Holiday Flash didn't ask much of anyone: it had one speed, one aperture, and a lens made of plastic that already had opinions about the future, most of them foggy.

Canadian Kodak Co., Limited, produced it from 1953 to 1964. It was a modest, Bakelite-bodied little democratizer stamped with red "MADE IN CANADA" pride. In doing so, it handed the act of memory-making to people who'd never once thought about f-stops, which is to say, most people, which is to say, the point entirely.

It's a camera that cannot zoom, cannot focus, and cannot compensate for a trembling hand or the November light. Yet, it was trusted, with birthdays and Christmases and the faces of people we'd give anything to see again. The flash, a Kodalite Midget running on AA batteries, fired its bulb in the heartbeat just before the shutter opened. It added the illusion of control to what was really an act of faith.

The vignetting darkens the corners; the slow shutter blurs the dog mid-leap; the plastic lens, if you're not careful, goes milky with age, as if the camera itself is choosing to forget. 127 film is nearly gone now, so the devoted respool 120 or MacGyver in 35mm adapters, because some things are worth the inconvenience of keeping alive.

What's remarkable isn't that the Brownie Holiday Flash took great photographs. It didn't, not reliably. But nobody minded. Maybe people loved it, unreservedly, the way one loves anything that fails you so consistently you mistake it for character.