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Founded in Turin, Italy, in 1919, by a textile merchant named Isaia Levi, the Fabbrica Italiana Penne a Serbatoio Aurora predates the Officina Meccanica Armando Simoni (OMAS) by half-a-dozen years, making Aurora one of Italy's oldest pen...
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Founded in Turin, Italy, in 1919, by a textile merchant named Isaia Levi, the Fabbrica Italiana Penne a Serbatoio Aurora predates the Officina Meccanica Armando Simoni (OMAS) by half-a-dozen years, making Aurora one of Italy's oldest pen manufacturers. The company's first lines of pens were made of hard rubber and styled after the Waterman pens that were being imported from the United States. Thus, the first Aurora "safety" fountain pens were filled using an eyedropper—pens with a built-in, lever-activated filler arrived in the early 1920s. By the mid- to late 1920s, Aurora began to make its pens out of colorful celluloid, a practice that was copied by OMAS in the 1930s. Similar in design to the Parker Duofold pens of the same period, Aurora called its celluloid pens Duplex, no doubt to capitalize on the name recognition of the U.S. imports. Indeed, buying Italian was a centerpiece of Aurora's advertising of the 1920s, and it was pitched to customers as a patriotic act. "Every fountain pen imported from abroad," read one ad, "represents a genuine gold coin which leaves Italy, and one day of employment for an Italian worker. Aurora is the Italian pen." In the 1930s, as fascism was creeping across Europe, Aurora introduced some of its more legendary pens, which today are highly sought by collectors. The Novum debuted in 1933, as both a round pen and a faceted one. One of the new features of the Novum was spring-loaded clip, which kept the pen securely attached to a shirt pocket. The following year, Aurora released the Asterope, which looked like a regular fountain pen with a removable cap, except this pen featured a slider that the user could move to cause the pen to appear from within the pen's housing. This single-handed operation was a complicated precursor to the ballpoint pens we click to open and close today. And then, in 1936 or thereabouts, to celebrate Italy's invasion and colonization of Ethiopia, Aurora offered Italian customers on duty there...
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