SOME ORGANIZATIONS, MOST NOTABLY NASA DURING ITS APOLLO PROGRAM, have always favored stand-up meetings, in which the lack of seats encourages brief, to-the-point exchanges of important information, after which everyone can get back to work. Publishing tends to attract less driven types, with most sit-down meetings divided equally between yarn-spinning and desultory discussion of work. A former editor in chief of this magazine was more businesslike than most, but even he had a weakness. The slightest mention of toasters would infallibly launch him into a 10-minute rant: “Why does my toast always come out with stripes? Why does it always pop up either too soon or too late?”
Many Americans share this obsession, as can be seen by the prices recently paid for pieces of toast with images of the Virgin Mary or the Runaway Bride of Georgia. In this issue’s “Object Lessons” and “Postfix” columns, we address the history of the toaster and of one of its tastiest outputs, the toaster pastry. While researching these stories, we were struck by the wealth of information about toaster-related topics to be found on the Internet.
Toaster.org, run by a foundation that hopes someday to open a bricksand-mortar museum, offers photos of antique and modern toasters, electronic greeting cards and games with toaster images, art (including a quite astonishing mosaic image of a toaster made from more than 3,000 slices of toast), vintage advertisements, and a discussion board with its dedicated coterie of toaster posters. Toastermuseum.com, a German-based English-language site with scores of beautiful photographs, lives up to its Teutonic origins by being more serious, more exhaustive, and more international than toaster.org. Drtoast.com covers the general subject of toast rather than toasters per se; its sections range from recipes (“Place 1 slice bread in toaster. Push lever down”) to toast haiku to “Ask Dr. Toast.” All of the preceding have numerous links to other toaster sites, which vary widely in whimsicality and relevance—including dozens that document attempts, mostly successful, to set Pop-Tarts on fire by leaving them in a toaster too long.
—Frederic D. Schwarz
