Absolute Gentleman

I was just browsing in my local Borders, but only because it was there. Borders is by far the most inferior of the book chains on and off the web. There’s no stock, their prices are too high for an alleged big book chain, and they brew terrible coffee. In my browsings, I came across a Moleskine-looking display of notebooks – only they weren’t Moleskines. These were called Piccadilly, an obvious ripoff of Moleskine. They’re black, have the elastic band wrapped around the notebook, the paper seems to be high quality, and most importantly to me, it opens up like a Moleskine does. The problem with most small journal-type notebooks is with the binding. Most have a seemingly spring-loaded binding that makes it impossible to write in the notebook without using a small boulder to hold down the other side of the book. It’s especially cumbersome for left-handed writers, like I am. Normally, with inexpensive, pretentious notebooks that white people like, you have to crack the binding in half for it to lie flat.

Piccadilly Notebooks don’t have this problem and they are 50% cheaper than Moleskine notebooks. Piccadilly, Inc. needs to know, though, that in spite of being a Borders exclusive company, the Moleskine display is way more prominently placed than the Piccadilly one. You walk into a Borders and the Moleskine display is right there in your face. The Piccadilly display is nestled in a ghost town section of my Borders, upstairs and buried on a shelf next the cookbooks.

Still, I’ll not buy one of these notebooks, nor will I buy a Moleskine ever again. Couple reasons: I have a few blank ones left from a Borders Outlet going out of business sale, where I got a bunch of lined Moleskines for three bucks a piece, and these Mead Composition books, the ones that were apparently good enough for my writing habits before I decided to lean toward being trendy. Mead Composition books range from $1 at Target to two or three dollars at CVS or Walgreens. It still looks cool, too, to walk around town with a Mead Composition book.