Field Guide No. 09 · The Wet Signature
Which Pen Should
a Lawyer Sign With?
Three formats, one hand, and only one of them belongs on a carbon-backed form.
By James Kaywell · A lawyer for 26 years · Active member of the District of Columbia Bar
This shop sells the same pen three times. The Esterbrook Estie in Nouveau Bleu is made as a fountain pen with a solid 18-karat gold nib, as a rollerball, and as a ballpoint — same swirled acrylic, same gold trim, same barrel in the hand. Only the ink differs. It sells the Sheaffer 300 three times too, at a third of the price: one barrel, three inks, from a house founded in Fort Madison, Iowa, in 1913.
The ink is the only variable — and it is enough to make them three different instruments. A lawyer signs three kinds of document in an ordinary week: the certificate that ends up framed, the letter that closes a matter, and the engagement letter signed on a clipboard — which nobody will ever admire, and which has to survive a filing cabinet for seven years.
The Three Formats
| Fountain | Rollerball | Ballpoint | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ink | Water-based dye | Water-based or gel | Oil-based paste |
| The line | Wettest, most character | Wet, dark, continuous | Drier, consistent |
| Pressure | Almost none | Very little | Real pressure, by design |
| Multi-part forms | No | No | Yes — the only one |
| Water resistance | Poor | Poor | Good |
| Dries | Slowest | Slow enough to smudge | Effectively at once |
| Lend it without thinking | No | Yes | Yes |
| Without saying it, it says | "This one was worth doing properly." | "I write a great deal by hand." | "Sign here." |
The pen that suits the first is a poor choice for the third, and the reason is chemistry rather than taste.
The Verdict
The honest version
The pen you would most like to sign with is not the pen you should sign most documents with.
A gold nib makes the better signature in every sense having to do with how it looks and how it feels to write. It also uses water-soluble ink, cannot mark a multi-part form, and is not a pen you hand to a stranger. None of that is a criticism. It is a description of what the thing is for.
Buying one pen: buy the ballpoint, and be unembarrassed about it. Buying two: add the rollerball, because a ballpoint is poor company for two hours of handwriting. Buy the fountain pen when a document is coming that deserves it — or, more often, for someone else, at the beginning of something. At the Sheaffer's price the question of one pen or two answers itself: buy two.
Exhibit A — What the ink actually does
Three inks, three jobs.
Ballpoint ink is an oil-based paste laid down by a ball under pressure. That pressure requirement looks like a shortcoming next to a fountain pen, and it is the whole reason the profession runs on ballpoints: pressure is what drives an impression through a carbonless multi-part form. It dries on contact and resists water.
Rollerball ink is water-based and thin, so it flows with almost no pressure — the wet line of a fountain pen with no nib to look after. It also feathers on cheap stock, shows through thin paper, and stays wet long enough to smudge under a moving hand.
Fountain ink reaches the nib by capillary action, asks the least pressure, and gives the most character: the line varies with the hand holding it, which is why an inscription written with one looks like a person wrote it. Most fountain inks are dye-based and water-soluble. A knocked-over glass takes the signature with it.
- AThe ballpoint's pressure carries the impression to every sheet — the original, the file copy and the client copy all get the signature.
- BThe rollerball marks the top sheet and stops there. So does a fountain pen. Nothing reaches sheets two and three.
A Note on the Color of Ink
Why the profession signs in blue
An original signature in blue can be told from a photocopy at a glance; a black one cannot. A clerk holding two versions of the same page knows at once which is the executed original. That is the whole reason, and the convention survives because it is useful rather than because anyone insists on it.
It is a practice, not a rule. Some agencies and older imaging systems specify black, and where a filing states a requirement the requirement wins. Where it does not, blue is the sensible default. Each format takes its own consumable: the rollerball a Schmidt-style refill in black or blue, the ballpoint a gel refill, and the fountain pen a cartridge or a converter and a bottle of ink. Ink color is a decision you can reverse for the price of a refill.
Building the Kit
Eight ways to sign
Four houses, each of them older than the pens they now make: Pelikan in Hanover since 18381, fountain pens since 19292; Esterbrook, an American name dating to 1858 in Camden, New Jersey3; S.T. Dupont, founded in Paris in 18724; and Sheaffer, founded in Fort Madison, Iowa, in 19135.
The format decides the ink, and the ink decides what the pen can be asked to do. What the maker decides is how long the thing lasts — whether a nib unscrews, whether a barrel survives a briefcase, whether the refill will still be made in a decade. Eight pens follow, across the three formats this guide has been arguing about. None of them is the answer. Two of them, together, usually are.
Fountain
Pelikan P205
Stocked in fine and medium
Steel nib, cartridge-and-converter fill, chrome trim, and the lightest fountain pen in the shop. Alone among the Pelikans here it does not fill by piston, which is most of why it costs and weighs less. This is the pen for finding out whether a fountain pen suits your hand before deciding how much you want it to.
See the P205Fountain
Pelikan Souverän M800
Stocked in fine and medium
Solid 18-karat gold nib, piston fill, and a brass-sleeved barrel that supplies the weight people mean when they say a pen feels serious. Pelikan brought the piston filler to market in 1929 and the mechanism is unchanged in principle: it shows how much ink is left and refills from a bottle. The certificate pen, in other words — the one the Docket below sends you to.
See the M800Fountain
Esterbrook Estie Fountain Pen, 18K
Nouveau Bleu, medium
The pen this guide opened on. Same swirled acrylic, same gold trim and same barrel as the Estie rollerball and ballpoint, with an 18-karat nib and a cartridge or converter where the others carry a ball. Buy it alongside one of the other two and you have a matched pair on the desk that behaves nothing alike on paper.
See the Estie fountain penRollerball
Esterbrook Estie Rollerball
Nouveau Bleu or Ebony
Water-based ink and no nib to look after: the wet line of a fountain pen in a pen you can hand across a table without thinking about it. This is the second pen the verdict recommends, the one for two hours of margins and redlines. It will smudge under a moving hand, and it will not mark a multi-part form. Watch it on film: Buy the Pen They'll Use.
See the Estie rollerballBallpoint
Pelikan Souverän K800
Stocked in black
The Souverän barrel — the same brass sleeve and the same proportions as the M800 — carrying the one ink that drives an impression through a carbonless form. If the argument above convinced you that the ballpoint is the pen you will actually reach for most days, this is that pen taken seriously.
See the K800Ballpoint
S.T. Dupont Classique Ballpoint
Black lacquer and gold
S.T. Dupont began in Paris in 1872 making document cases and travel goods for diplomats; the pens and the lighters came later, the same discipline applied to smaller objects. Black lacquer, gold trim, oil-based ink. The ballpoint you are not embarrassed to produce at a closing, which is a low bar that almost no ballpoint clears.
See the ClassiqueAll three
Sheaffer 300
Fountain pen in fine or medium, rollerball, ballpoint
The full-sized Sheaffer, with the slotted clip and the wide cap band, made as all three of the instruments this guide has been arguing about and sold here under one listing: choose the ink, not a different pen. Steel nib, cartridge or converter, a black box that opens like an eyeglass case. A good pen at an entry price — the first fountain pen for a great many lawyers, and it costs what a good dinner costs.
See the 300All three
Sheaffer 100
Fountain pen in fine or medium, rollerball, ballpoint
The slimmer Sheaffer, with the cut-out clip, in coffee brown lacquer under gold trim — the only brown pen in the shop. Same three inks, same one listing, a little less in the hand and a little less at the till. For the shirt pocket rather than the desk, and for the lawyer who finds black severe.
See the 100- The 1838 date traces to the Hanover ink and artists' colour works of Carl Hornemann; Günther Wagner acquired the business in 1871 and registered the pelican mark in 1878. Ink and artists' materials, not pens, are what the 1838 date refers to. Accord Field Guide No. 03, Fine Nib, or Medium?, note 4. ↩
- Pelikan's first fountain pen reached market in 1929 carrying the piston mechanism of Hungarian engineer Theodor Kovács. U.S. Patent No. 1,706,616 (filed Sept. 15, 1927; issued Mar. 26, 1929); see also German Patent No. DE457462 (filed Sept. 29, 1926; issued Mar. 16, 1928); The Piston Filling Mechanism, 1929–1950, Pelikan Heritage & Tradition Archive, archive.pelikan.com. ↩
- Richard Esterbrook established The Esterbrook Steel Pen Mfg. Co. at Camden, New Jersey, in 1858. Brand History, esterbrookpens.com ("For one hundred years Esterbrook was the pride of Camden, NJ"). But see id. ("Today, the Esterbrook brand lives on 120 miles north of its original home, at Kenro headquarters in Mineola, NY"): the original company's operations ended in 1971, the name was acquired in 2014, and it has been held by Kenro Industries since 2018. The name is continuous; the manufacture is not. Esterbrook does not publish where the Estie is made, and neither do we. ↩
- Heritage, us.st-dupont.com ("in 1872, aged just 25, Simon Tissot Dupont opened his first leatherwork shop in Paris"). The first serially produced lighter followed in 1941, the first ballpoint in 1973. The description of the original workshop as supplying document cases to diplomats rests on secondary accounts rather than on the maker's own page. ↩
- The Sheaffer Pen Company was founded in 1913 by Walter A. Sheaffer, a jeweler in Fort Madison, Iowa, on the strength of his lever-filling mechanism. The Sheaffer Story, Sheaffer 2026 catalogue, and Brand History, sheaffer.com. The name is American; Sheaffer states that its writing instruments are currently manufactured in India, and so do we, on every Sheaffer page. ↩
A Note on Availability
Stock on individual models moves. The Pelikan Souverän R800 — the only Pelikan rollerball we carry — and the Souverän K400 ballpoint are carried but not always on the shelf, the Souverän M805 comes and goes in fine, and the Estie ballpoint runs through some finishes faster than others. The Sheaffer 300 is carried in four finishes and the 100 in one, each in all three forms. Where a pen shows as unavailable it is out of stock, not discontinued.
Write to us before you order and we will tell you what is on hand, what can be brought in, and roughly how long it will take. The same goes for refills, cartridges and converters, which move faster than the pens they belong to.
On Film
The first good pen
Twenty-one seconds on the Sheaffer 300: four finishes, three inks, one listing. For graduation, for passing the bar exam, for the oath of admission, or for the first year as an associate.
Watch it On the Record, with all four finishes beside it. Or go straight to the glossy black with gold trim, the matte black, the glossy blue or the engraved barrel.
The Docket
Which one, which moment
The document on the desk decides the pen, every time.
| The document | The pen |
|---|---|
| Certificate or inscription | Fountain, medium nib |
| A letter closing a matter | Rollerball, or fountain |
| Notes, redlines, margins | Rollerball |
| Anything multi-part | Ballpoint, no exceptions |
| Signed away from a desk | Ballpoint |
| A pen you may not get back | Ballpoint |
Written by James Kaywell
