Picadilly notebooks: sometimes you get what you pay for.

Pos­si­bly the biggest dis­ap­point­ment in my review of note­books over the last cou­ple years has been the Pic­cadil­ly Essen­tial Note­book. Pic­cadil­ly’s Essen­tial line of note­books is almost indis­tin­guish­able from the Mole­sk­ine, but at a third to one-half the price. When I say indis­tin­guish­able, I mean in near­ly every detail. The oil­skin cov­er looks like the Mole­sk­ine, the paper is the same cream col­or with the same 6mm rul­ing, there’s an elas­tic enclo­sure and a pock­et in the back. For just a few bucks, how can you go wrong? Even if the paper were of no more con­sis­tent qual­i­ty than the Mole­sk­ine’s, Pic­cadil­ly could be the one to knock Mole­sk­ine off the throne on price alone.

First the good news: the paper in the sam­ples I test­ed is con­sis­tent and though with some inks and pens shows spread­ing and feath­er­ing, the paper respond­ed more predictably—what spread or feath­ered on one page would on oth­er pages as well, and pen and ink com­bi­na­tions that worked well on once page would per­form sim­i­lar­ly on others.

The paper is not of bet­ter qual­i­ty than the best paper in Mole­sk­ines, but it is con­sis­tent­ly bet­ter than the aver­age, and much more pre­dictable. That should be a qual­i­fied win for Pic­cadil­ly, though those that have got­ten lucky with good batch­es of Mole­sk­ines may disagree.

Where the Pic­cadil­ly Essen­tial falls down is dura­bil­i­ty. After a cou­ple weeks of writ­ing, the elas­tic enclo­sure became so stretched out that I had to dou­ble it back a few inch­es and hold the enclo­sure in place with goril­la tape. Even that fix was tem­po­rary; by the time the note­book was filled the elas­tic was com­plete­ly stretched out—a full sev­en inch­es longer than it had start­ed. Even tap­ing down one side no longer fixed the prob­lem, because it no longer had any elas­tic­i­ty so the note­book would not open.

Sad­ly, this does not appear to be an iso­lat­ed inci­dent. Of the two Pic­cadil­ly sam­ples I pur­chased, the sec­ond one came out of the shrinkwrap already with the elas­tic fatigued beyond use­ful­ness. I’ll be giv­ing this to some­one who does­n’t care about the elas­tic enclosure.

Nor is this the only qual­i­ty issue encoun­tered with the Pic­cadil­ly note­book. Gen­er­al­ly the mate­ri­als used sim­ply aren’t as durable as I’ve come to expect with oth­er note­books. The book­mark with my Pic­cadil­ly sim­ply fell out after a few months of use. One moment it was attached, the next it was on the floor.

Dur­ing my months of test­ing, the mate­r­i­al around the bind­ing both inside and out­side the spine became torn. This has hap­pened to the cov­ers of Mole­sk­ines in my expe­ri­ence but I’ve nev­er seen a note­book sub­ject­ed only to reg­u­lar use come apart on the inside this way.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, the fold­er in the back cov­er held up over time and use. I use the word «sur­pris­ing­ly» only because the paper bel­lows feels flim­sy com­pared to the cloth-tape sides found in the back pock­ets of many note­books. Clear­ly what Pic­cadil­ly did held up under my abuse so I have no cause to com­plain or den­i­grate the prod­uct on this point, but I still eye that pock­et with a bit of sus­pi­cion and count myself as for­tu­nate not to have dam­aged it.

One could sum this up quite nice­ly by describ­ing the Pic­cadil­ly as a cheap ver­sion of a Mole­sk­ine. There are nuances to the word «cheap» that one would nor­mal­ly wish to avoid that in the case of the Pic­cadil­ly I would embrace. My recomme­da­tion: if you don’t treat your note­books too harsh­ly, you might get away with cut­ting off the elas­tic enclo­sure and pre­tend­ing it is a note­book that nev­er came with one. And hope that your book­mark does­n’t fall out.