WHAT CONDITION THE CONDITION IS IN: AS IS. Not film tested. This Vanguard Spartus 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.

Herold Products operating out of Chicago during those optimistic years between 1960 and 1962, produced the Vanguard Spartus at a moment when even a toy-grade camera needed to look like it could survive re-entry.

Cast in high-impact plastic with a brushed aluminum faceplate that catches the light like a Studebaker hood ornament, this particular unit belongs to the 1961 Rocket-type batch. A single uncoated Meniscus element doing its slightly myopic best.

It shoots 127 roll film, twelve exposures at 4cm x 4cm nominal, through a 1/50th-second rotary shutter and a sliding plate that shifts between f/11 for B&W and f/16 for colour*, as though it understood that Kodachrome deserved one additional stop of respect.

The eye-level viewfinder is bright. There's no double-exposure prevention on the ratcheted metal advance knob, which means the shutter will snap as many times as your finger cares to ask.

Some units came in brown-tinted bodies; this one didn't, but isn't it enough that it exists at all, this compact, space-age artifact, a camera that was never quite serious and is, for precisely that reason, impossible to forget?

*The shift to f/16 for colour might seem counterintuitive today since colour film was slower, but it was a design choice intended to force users to only shoot colour in the brightest possible light, ensuring a "safe" exposure for a camera with a slow 1/50s shutter.