With its latest Special Edition, "Chicago", Pelikan honors another exciting world metropolis. Based on the Sovereign 600 series, the new Special Edition M620 features a highly varied and unique design of a special translucent cast resin in grays, blacks and pearl marble. The clip and trim fittings are silver plated, adding a formal yet subtle appearance to this newest in the series, in contrast to the gold filled trim on prior models in this series. This pen certainly does honor to Chicago, reflecting the massive gray steel and marble architecture that has made it a world class city.

The Chicago is also more subdued than the brilliant blue pearl Stockholm, the emerald greens of the Berlin or the fiery reds of the Madrid with the translucent marble almost appearing as a demonstrator. The San Francisco is slightly different with the swirling and blending colors of it’s golden Amber, browns and Bay Area foggy pearls.
The M620 is a very comfortable size, well positioned between the smaller M400 and the larger 800. The 400 size has been almost a standard with Pelikan for many years, but with many fountain pens almost standardized to the M600 size, I feel this will be a very popular configuration. The much larger M1000 would have a much smaller audience of use, so logically this City Series in the M620 size was a wise choice to reach the largest audience of pen users. Still I wish I could get the City Series in the 800 size; maybe some day…
The Chicago, and all others in this Series have 18 carat gold nibs available in Fine, Medium or Broad. I find that the modern Pelikan nibs are running slightly finer than in the past; the Medium I tested is more true to an American Medium. This is in comparison to Japanese nibs which are still usually finer in all degrees. I also noted that the old style M600 18 (the earliest imports when the 600 was the same size as the 400) and 14 carat nibs seemed to be more flexible than currently provided, however a definite flex can be coaxed from the Medium 18 carat nib tested with this Chicago fountain pen.
The final polished iridium shape of Pelikan nibs, the part of the iridium that makes contact with paper, has a profile with what I call an oval footprint which results in a slight shading. This seems to be the case in almost all the degrees of nibs from Fine to Broad.
I personally find that Pelikan nibs are very relaxing to use as a result of being slightly soft, versus a firmer nib that results in eventual writing fatigue.

The Chicago rollerball is exactly the same size as the fountain pen, making for a handsome companion. Note that only Pelikan rollerball refills can be used without special adaptation; but they have always been excellent. The ballpoint pen has the typical butter smooth cap rotation and has a slightly smaller girth than the rollerball or the fountain pen and it accepts the new Parker gel ball point refills I enjoy for those few times I need to press hard.
Living in the Chicago area I could not help being attracted to this model. Not only for it’s beauty, style and sophisticated silver trim, but it would also give me a great excuse at any social function to show off my pens Chicago–style.