This is an exceptionally exciting post for me–one that is several years in the making. I want to review the original Aurora 88 and all of its descendants because I have an example of all of them (with three exceptions that I’ll get to). I also have some cool documents and paraphernalia I wanted to share, too–partly because I’m an Aurora fanboy/nerd, but also because the English-language information available on these pens is lacking.
I have two main sources of information that I’m citing. The first and most important is Leticia Jacopini’s book La Storia della Stilografica in Italia 1900-1950, Volume One. I own a hard copy of the book, but both volumes are available for download on her website. Her works are the single best resource on Italian fountain pens in English bar none, change my mind.
The second source was an unbelievably detailed post from 2009 by the user “diplomat” on the Fountain Pen Network, here. I’m not a member of FPN–they never bothered to respond to my email for membership–but I have to give credit where credit is due. edit: okay, I’m a member of FPN now, on good terms, as of December 6th. They underwent an extensive site upgrade and users being unable to register was a known issue. I won’t hold it against them.
Before getting into more individual detail, I wanted to cover a few more similarities here to avoid repeating them numerous times. The 88, 88K, and 88P are all piston fillers. They will always have to be restored to working order when you get them, even if the seller claims the pen is in working order (it’s not, I guarantee it, or it won’t be for very long in the best case scenario). One can trust some restorer/sellers like David Nishimura or Mike and Linda of Indy Pen Dance to restore these prior to selling them, but the vast majority of sellers, especially on eBay or similar, will not bother with them. While the process is not hard, in principle, the threaded piston head is incredibly fragile and will usually crumble to dust during the restoration. I recommend that you send these to a pro for restoration. It would be awesome if someone with the know-how could figure out how to 3D print these pistons–then restoring them would be a trivial task akin to replacing a sac on a lever filler. (If you figure out how to do it, I’ll happily buy a dozen of them.)
The oldest 98’s are also piston fillers, but the mechanism is completely different and made of more durable, modern materials. These typically will function okay without a lot of drama.
Newer 98s, the International, and the new Duo Cart pens all use Aurora’s cartridge/converter system, which is readily obtainable.
The rest of the pens are cartridge filled and were never intended to be used with a converter–converters didn’t exist. The pens use old Aurora Biflux cartridges, which are obsolete and not made anymore. By sheer coincidence, Platinum-brand cartridges and converters will mount on these older pens. Because they were not meant to fill via a converter, filling them in such a manner can be fiddly, but it can be done. One could also refill the vintage Aurora cartridges, but I have chosen to retain my cartridges as they are for the sake of collecting.
Because I collect Aurora fountain pens, I incidentally also collect Aurora ballpoints and merchandise more broadly, so I’ll be including that information as well. A quick note on vintage Aurora ballpoints: modern-day ISO G1-style refills (a la the Schneider Express 225 or Aurora’s own Wagon refill not Pilot’s G1!) are dimensionally identical to Aurora’s old ballpoint refills except the modern refills have a plastic tail. Sometimes they fit without modification, but one can also trim the tail back to get them to fit. As far as I can tell, all of Aurora’s pre-1970 ballpoints use the ISO-G1/Wagon refill, at least until they adopted Parker’s standard of refills for all of their pens. Even today, the Wagon refill is used in Aurora’s skinny ballpoints, so they are available.
No matter what anyone tells you, the original 88 was not a flex pen. It just wasn’t, pure and simple. The nibs on the early 88’s were quite responsive, maybe I’d go so far as to call them soft, but only if they are equipped with the soft nibs in the first place. Aurora offered 17 nib choices on 88s, and while most of them are, indeed, of the soft extra fine, fine, or medium variety, not all of them were. The nibs on all but two of my pens are downright rigid. I use the term “soft” to differentiate Aurora’s old-school standard nibs from their stiffer nibs throughout this post. I do not recommend these pens for users looking for flex–go get a Waterman 52 or a Mabie-Todd Swan. Hell, even a Sheaffer Jr. with a Junior nib is a better flex pen. I’m serious. You’ll be disappointed. Now, if you’re looking for a bouncy, responsive nib that can add a little bit of flair to writing, you’ll be in luck.
Finally, that Aurora feedback that us Aurora people gush over? Oh yeah, that’s here in droves. And I love it.
The 88 was designed by Marcello Nizzoli and released around 1946. The pen is simple in its elegance–a round, cigar-shaped pen made from black celluloid and featuring a metal cap. There aren’t a bunch of different finishes for the 88, but there were many options for the caps, including gold plate, Nikargenta, chrome, sterling, rolled gold, and so on. Mine is a gold-plated cap, which seem to be the most popular option. Again, the 88 fills with a piston and has a nice, functional ink window. The section of the pen, as well as the piston knob, are black ebonite.
Apparently there were also all gold-plated pens and solid gold pens, but I’ve never actually seen one.
The star of this show is the nib. Most of the early pens were equipped with either a soft fine or soft medium nib, indicated by a colored dot on the end of the pen–which was missing from mine. Only specialty nib grades were engraved on these pens, which leads me to believe that this pen is a standard issue, soft fine.
It’s gloriously feedbacky and super responsive. I cannot really describe it. It feels like a vintage Aurora in the best way possible. I know I said don’t flex these pens, but just look at this:
That is with practically zero effort. It is fantastic.
With user-contributed serial numbers and a lot of speculation, users on Fountain Pen Network (again, I’m not affiliated LOL JK guys) generated approximate dates of manufacture. My 88, using their list, was likely manufactured around 1948, give or take.
The 88K was released around 1953, with some overlap in production. The pen itself is dimensionally identical to the original 88. The biggest non-aesthetic change that Aurora made was they began to manufacture the 88K’s section and piston knob out of celluloid.
The 88K was available with the same cap options and nib options as the 88. I actually have seen pens that were entirely gold-plated, unlike the 88, so I know those exist.
My pen is equipped with a hard fine nib. It’s rigid, smooth, feedbacky, and wet.
My 88K came to me new old stock in a box labeled FIAT. It was likely a corporate gift that sat in a desk somewhere for 65 years before coming to me, along with all of the sweet retro paperwork!
My 88K was made around 1955.
Next came the Aurora Duo Cart in 1954, which was revolutionary in its own right. This pen was an early example of a cartridge pen, mostly aimed at school kids. Aurora used the sections right off of 88’s in an attempt to cut some costs, so these pens write just as well as full-fledged 88’s. The pen used the dual cartridge carrier–seen above–and when the user was out of ink they were to discard the empty cartridge and flip the carrier around. An ink alarm feature–a tiny ball on the end of a tiny chain in the pen’s barrel–reminded the user to get a new cartridge. This feature is more annoying than useful and was omitted in Aurora’s later cartridge pens. Modern users are forced to find a way to disable this alarm–I cut the nipple end off an empty international cartridge and placed it over the turning knob of the pen’s converter to act as a spacer to keep the alarm from driving me nuts.
Unfortunately, my 88 Duo Cart is in rough shape–tons of cap brassing, the clip is loose and floppy, and the jewel on the end of the barrel was obviously super glued into place at some point. But it writes. The nib feels very similar to the hard fine nib on my 88K; Aurora did not engrave the nib grade on these pens, so I’m left guessing once again.
The pens were available with a couple different plastic bodies and either black or red ebonite sections. I don’t know what Aurora’s serial number methodology was, but I get the sense that this pen was a very early 88 Duo Cart.
This pen is kind of cool. It’s aesthetically unique and different from the rest of the family–it’s a little blocky and chunky, and the short cap just works, in a weird way. The pen also changed the way people used fountain pens–cartridge/converter pens are the most prolific type now, and this was one of the earliest, commercially successful cartridge pens, along with the Waterman C/F that was introduced in 1953.
The 888 was a more grown-up version of the 88 Duo Cart and was released around 1956. It was a unique design, not just the section off of a more expensive pen made cheaper. It made use of the Duo Cart’s cartridge system with the ink alarm feature.
The nib on this pen is a K13, which is stamped on the included warranty card and engraved on the pen’s section. Once again, I have no idea what the K nibs are supposed to be. The tipping material on this pen is not shaped like the K nib illustrations on the above documentation, but the nib is ever so slightly up-swept. Regardless, this may be my favorite nib out of all of these pens. It appears to be a fine and is slightly more rigid than the soft nib on my 88, but far more responsive than the hard fine on my 88K. It is perfectly tuned and an absolute joy to write with.
Of the cartridge converter pens I own in this family, this is by a wide margin my favorite, and is probably in the top three of my favorite vintage Auroras. The pen is very light, well balanced, and has a long, comfortable section. Plus it writes like a dream.
Unfortunately, people living in Italy during the late 50s were not as enthusiastic about this pen as I am and it was not the hot seller Aurora hoped for. The 888 was only made until 1959 or so; mine has a late-ish serial number and is probably a ’57 or ’58, if I had to guess.
The Firma (Italian for “Signature”) was released around 1957 and is an interesting, but often overlooked variant. Desk pens were far more popular in the past than they are presently.
The Firma uses Aurora’s Biflux cartridges just like the Duo Cart and 888, but it did not make use of the cartridge carrier or the ink alarm–I checked, the double cartridge carrier does not fit in the pen. I am not sure if they decided it wasn’t necessary for a desk pen or if they were already in the process of phasing the system out.
The nib is a gloriously juicy medium and very pleasant to use. It is at this point that I noticed the pens start to feel much more “modern.” The sections and bodies on these newer pens are obviously plastic–not celluloid–and the nibs start to feel stiffer and are not as responsive. It’s still a good writer and it is nicely balanced, as desk pens tend to be.
The pen came with a thick glass base and pen trumpet–which looks like a rocket ship or something. It feels very, very late 50’s.
The 88P debuted around the same time, circa 1958 or so. It is widely considered to be the pinnacle of the 88 family of pens–it was made entirely in celluloid, the cap–which came in the same options as every other 88-type pen except Nikargenta–was the most finely engraved. I will admit that the 88P feels more refined than the 88K and much, much more modern than the 88–which would have been considered a good thing in 1958.
My 88P is a later model, as indicated by its lack of serial number. Aurora stopped serializing the 88P in 1963.
Unfortunately, as nicely finished as the 88P is, it debuted right as ballpoints and cheaper fountain pen options were growing in popularity. Even so, Aurora managed to sell well over a million of these beautiful pens before they ceased production sometime in the 60’s.
The 888P was the natural evolution of the 888 and started production sometime in 1959. Early models may have included the ink alarm system, but mine does not. The pen did make use of the Duo Cart cartridge carrier system, though. The pen is entirely plastic and uses the exact same cap as the 88P. The section is interchangeable with the section of the Firma.
My 888P is heavily worn; the section engraving is barely visible and it is covered in light surface scratches but it does not appear to have been abused or left in some cellar somewhere.
At first, I was least impressed by this pen. It seemed to me that Aurora was just trying to cut costs with this model (using the same parts, cheapening the materials, etc.) and I was just adding it to the collection for the sake of completion. But the more I look at the way it is worn, along with the fact that the pen came in the original box with an old box of modern Aurora cartridges tucked inside, the more I realize that it tells a story of a pen that was heavily used and well-loved. A pen put away once the last ink cartridge was used up, but not before the owner tried one final time to use the new line of cartridges. Someone loved this pen. That’s part of the appeal of collecting vintage pens.
The 98. The final evolution of the 88 proper. This is where Aurora really tries to engage in the modern age with something completely new.
The 98 was released in 1963, and keeping with the tastes of the time, the pen was thinner and blockier. It’s still a piston filler, but the pen uses modern, durable plastics.
My 98 happens to be a sterling silver model in a set with a ballpoint. It was a corporate gift for someone working at Alitalia–the largest airline in Italy. I think that’s pretty cool. The deep blue velvet clam shell box is housed in a pinstriped cardboard outer sleeve.
I love the 98. I think the design is clever and the pen is slick. It’s a nice size–not too fat, not too heavy. The pen writes well, posts well, and feels good in the hand. Despite being made of silver, it’s only a gram heavier than the 888P. And it writes well–it’s a smooth, toothy medium that feels good. Granted, the piston design would be called a captive converter and scoffed at today, but at the time there was no such thing as a captive converter, it was just a piston filler–converters for cartridge pens were just sort of starting to take off when this pen hit the market. The pen only holds 0.9mL of ink.
But what makes this pen awesome is the influence it had on Aurora’s future pens. This pen introduced the Riserva Magica concept, which Aurora still uses. And we still see design elements from the 98 floating around in Auora’s modern lineup–the Style series comes to mind. The 98 was also a transitional piece; it bridges the gap between the thicker cigar-shaped pens of the past and the thinner pens of the 1970s. I think it’s a really interesting pen.
At some point, Aurora stopped making the Riserva Magica 98’s and was only churning out cartridge/converter 98s. There was also some overlap with another series of pen called the International, which is, as far as I can tell, a cartridge/converter 98 but made with cheaper materials. The pen I have isn’t vintage per se, it was released in the early 2000s as part of Aurora’s Archivi Storici series–the story goes that Aurora found some new-old-stock parts, slapped some pens together, and sold them. So this is the Archivi Storici model 016, a new/old Aurora International:
This is also the generation of pens in which Aurora began using the Parker standard of cartridge/converter, which would have been in the late 60s or so.
I like this pen quite a bit; it was the third Aurora I purchased and the one that got me interested in vintage Aurora pens. Unfortunately, it’s also the last retro pen that I own that is a direct descendant of the granddaddy 88. I considered discussing the Hastil, but it’s not related to the 88 in any way. Similarly, the modern 88 doesn’t truly belong here either.
What does belong in this discussion, however, is the modern rendition of the Duo Cart. It’s pretty easy to trace their lineage back to the 88.
I already talked about the 2017 release of the modern Duo Cart here. I won’t drone about the 2019 version, except to say that it kept all of the good parts of the 2017 version but fixed the bad parts. It’s a solid, modern day pen.
There are few more models floating around that probably belong on this list that I’ve overlooked, as well as a few that I’m aware of that are worth mentioning that I don’t have examples of. In the 1960s, Aurora replaced the (old) Duo Cart with the updated Aurora 2Cart, which gave rise to the Auretta family of school pens. Those are extremely collectable in themselves. Finally, there is a model called Per Lei (For Her) which was a line of Aurora 98s without clips, sometimes with tassels on the caps. These were ladies purse pens, and while I think they’re lovely, I just don’t have any on hand.
Asking me to identify which is my favorite is like asking me to identify which of my kids are my favorite–I love all of them. If pressed, I could limit the list to three (pens, not kids)–the 88, the 888, and the 98–but I couldn’t rank them. The 88K makes the list sometimes, too, but I think that’s just because it was a white whale for me–I had a heck of a time finding an 88K for a non-insane price to add to my collection.
I suppose the real question is “why?” Why would a young Midwestern man, who neither speaks Italian, nor has any Italian heritage, who’s never even been to Italy, be so interested in an Italian pen company?
A pen is just a stick that makes marks on a page. A free ballpoint from the bank is realistically the only writing device one would ever need. A crayon picked up from the floor of Applebee’s accomplishes the same practical task, too.
But sometimes you just have to listen to your heart. I believe Dan Smith called it “feeding your soul” in one of his videos back in the day. Aurora feeds my soul.
Anyways, that’s the story I’m sticking to.
Specs:
- Vintage Aurora 88
- Cap:
- Friction fit, postable.
- There were a bunch of options out there.
- Nib:
- 14k semi-hooded, soft fine.
- 17 options available. Almost all of them that survived are fine or medium.
- Body:
- Black celluloid body with ink window. Section and piston knob in black ebonite.
- Filling system:
- Piston, 1.7mL capacity.
- Length:
- Capped: 138mm
- Uncapped: 127mm
- Posted: 148mm
- Weight:
- Total: 22g
- Pen: 14g
- Cap: 8g
- Section diameter:
- 8-11.5mm
- Cap:
- Aurora 88K
- Cap: friction fit, postable, a lot of options.
- Nib: 14k HF, a lot of options.
- Body: black celluloid.
- Filling system: piston, 1.7mL capacity.
- Length: capped 138mm; uncapped 128mm; posted 148mm
- Weight: total 22g; pen 14g; cap 8g
- Section diameter: 8-11.5mm
- Vintage Aurora Duo Cart
- Cap: friction fit; postable. Chrome or gold plated.
- Nib: Fine? I don’t know what options were available.
- Body: black plastic; black ebonite section. There were a bunch of options back in the day.
- Filling system: Duo Cart cartridge carrier with ink alarm, originally with Aurora Biflux cartridges. Accepts modern Platinum cartridge/converters. Around 0.5mL capacity with converter.
- Length: capped 137mm; uncapped 129mm; posted 152mm
- Weight: total 19g, pen 12g; cap 7g
- Section diameter: 8-11.5mm
- Vintage Aurora 888:
- Cap: friction fit; postable. Several historic options.
- Nib: “K13.” Probably fine. Probably 17 nib options, historically.
- Body: black…plastic? Maybe celluloid.
- Filling system: Duo Cart cartridge carrier with ink alarm, originally with Aurora Biflux cartridges. Accepts modern Platinum cartridge/converters. Around 0.5mL capacity with converter.
- Length: capped 138mm; uncapped 127mm; posted 151mm
- Weight: total 20g; pen 12g; cap 8g
- Section diameter: 8-11.5mm
- Aurora Firma:
- Cap: Not applicable. It’s a desk pen. It does rest in a cool desk stand.
- Nib: 14k medium. I don’t know what options were available.
- Body: black plastic.
- Filling system: Historically Aurora Biflux cartridges. Accepts modern Platinum cartridge/converters. Around 0.5mL capacity with converter.
- Length: 172mm
- Weight:13g
- Section diameter: 8-11mm
- Aurora 88P
- Cap: friction fit, postable. All of the usual cap options.
- Nib: 14k Fine, I don’t know what historic options are out there.
- Body: black celluloid.
- Filling system: piston, 1.7mL capacity.
- Length: capped 135mm; uncapped 127mm; posted 146mm
- Weight: total 21g; pen 14g; cap 7g
- Section diameter: 8-11mm
- Aurora 888P
- Cap: friction fit, postable.
- Nib: 14k fine. Probably other options out there.
- Body: black plastic.
- Filling system: Duo Cart cartridge carrier with ink alarm, originally with Aurora Biflux cartridges. Accepts modern Platinum cartridge/converters. Around 0.5mL capacity with converter.
- Length: capped 137mm; uncapped 127mm; posted 145mm
- Weight: total 22g; pen 14g; cap 8g
- Section Diameter: 8-11mm
- Aurora 98 Riserva Magica
- Cap: friction fit, postable.
- Nib: 14k medium; probably other options out there.
- Body: usually black plastic; shown in sterling silver.
- Filling system: riserva magica piston; 0.9mL capacity.
- Length: capped 140mm; uncapped 127mm; posted 145mm
- Weight: total 23g; pen 15g; cap 8g
- Section diameter: 8-10mm
- Aurora International/98 Cartridge
- Cap: friction fit, postable.
- Nib: 14k medium; probably other options out there.
- Body: matte finished plastic shown, other versions were available.
- Filling system: modern Aurora; capacity around 0.8mL with converter.
- Length: capped 137mm; uncapped 126mm; posted 144mm
- Weight: total 17g, pen 10g, cap 7g
- Section diameter: 8-10mm
- Aurora 2017 Duo Cart
- Specs at the end of the review, here.
- Aurora 2019 Duo Cart
- As 2017 version, except:
- Uncapped length is 119mm, posted length is 140mm
- Weight: total 26g; pen 15g; cap 11g
- As 2017 version, except:
Mat's Pens 