I am enjoying a run of good luck in my fountain pen acquisitions. Hot on the heels of my “four countries and six new pens in a week” cruise ship holiday, I stumbled across a vintage Aurora in an antiques market.

This happened in Spitalfields Market, where my wife and I had come to buy her a hat. Actually, she may have spotted the pens before I did. There, on a shelf, displayed in its Aurora box, was a fountain pen that I was unfamiliar with.

This was a slim, cylindrical pen with a glossy gun-metal finish and a gold-coloured pocket clip, cap-band and barrel end. Pulling off the snap-cap revealed a black section and a gold-coloured nib, flat topped with bends at the sides, a bit like a Lamy Safari nib but with no visible imprint. A generous blob of tipping and the condition of the body all suggested that the pen had seen little use.

Generally speaking, I do not gravitate towards slim pens. However, for a vintage Aurora I was prepared to make an exception. It was mine for £20.00.

With no papers in the box, I tried to think of the pen’s name. The name “Profil” kept coming to mind but no, that was a Lamy range. Then I remembered the name Hastil. Was it a Hastil perhaps? For a brief time, I thought it was.

Examining my purchase at home, I found the only bit of branding, the name AURORA in tiny letters on the cap but, unusually, printed in line with the pocket clip and barely noticeable on a casual inspection. I also discovered that the cap was cleverly designed to post, with a satisfying click, to add a bit of heft and length, making a very comfortable unit.

I flushed the section and then pushed in a brown Aurora cartridge, from a box which I had fortuitously bought at a recent pen show. It wrote beautifully, with a nice medium line, good flow, no skipping, no hard-starts, no scratchiness. I was delighted.

Also, I surprised myself in finding that I took so well to such a slim pen. This was a revelation rather like when, as a teenager, I discovered that I did like strawberries after all.

Some research on the internet and in old Aurora catalogues, revealed that my pen was not the Hastil. From a similar pen being sold on eBay, I gathered that mine was the Aurora Marco Polo. (Marco Polo, c. 1254-1324, Venetian merchant, explorer and writer). I did read up about the Hastil, and learned that it was designed by Marco Zanuso, and introduced in 1970. The slim, cylindrical metal design was so novel and successful that the Hastil became the first fountain pen to be exhibited in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

I gather that my pen came later, and whilst sharing some superficial similarities to the Hastil, it did not have the Hastil’s gold nib (in a distinctive, scoop shape) nor the cap which was flush with the barrel – yet postable due to a barely perceptible tapering of the barrel. The Hastil also had a special recessed pocket clip feature.

I had not seen an Aurora Hastil in the flesh. But then by a strange coincidence, we were visiting a friend in north London, just a few days after my purchase of the Aurora. Knowing of my interest in pens, she went to dig out a few old pens to show me. Imagine my surprise, when one of these was an Aurora Hastil, complete with its original, extraordinary, metal cylinder box, with papers, a pair of unused Aurora cartridges (from which the ink had almost entirely evaporated) and the accompanying converter, called the Trik-Trak. Our friend could shed no light whatsoever on how she came to have this pen. I suspect that it had been purchased by or gifted to her husband, long since deceased.

Having spent the previous few evenings gleaning information on the internet, I was thrilled to see an actual Aurora Hastil and took a few photos of it. These are not vintage pens that you come across very often. Fortunately, our friend’s son is a fountain pen enthusiast who will appreciate its worth.

Finally, my lucky streak did not end here: with my Pen Repair Course approaching, I had popped into a local antiques shop to ask whether they had any old pens, as I needed some to work on. The proprietor rummaged in a box, in a dimly lit corner of his cluttered shop piled high with furniture and all manner of bric-a-brac. He then emerged with a bundle of five fountain pens, namely a Parker 51 aerometric, a Parker Slimfold, two lever-fillers: – a ‘Swan’ Mabie Todd SF2 and a Pitman College and finally a black plastic “Marksman” Chinese pen. He would not sell them separately but only as a job lot. I bought the lot, and got them all clean and working again. I have been having a great time with them but will save this for another post.