Piccadilly Wire-O Notebooks

Piccadilly, Inc. was kind enough to send a couple of their products for review and on first glance they look like the sort of notebooks I would really enjoy. But looks aren’t everything.

First the medium-sized Wire-O Notebook  just because I love the Hokusai art on the cover. I could snap up inks in all the colors depicted and be quite happy. So I was prepared to love this notebook regardless of the slightly bent wire rings, a hazard with all wire-bound products. The wire ought to be a more heavy gauge for such a thick notebook but that’s not a deal-breaker.

Piccadilly Wire-O Notebook

Moving beyond the charm of the cover, the paper has a smooth texture that is the sort that might or might not be good for fountain pens. Sometimes you just know a paper is going to be terrific but this paper could go either way. So I lined up a half dozen pens with as many different inks to give the Wire-O a proper fountain pen test.

The first combination tested, Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo in a Pilot Elite Socrates F, proved at least one free-flowing ink would feather mildly and produce rough edges with wider than normal lines and mild bleed-through. <insert expletive> The ink color was beautiful on the white paper with medium gray lines so that was a plus. Otherwise performance was mildly disappointing.

Next I tried J. Herbin Terre de Feu in a Lamy Al-Star EF, a dry-writing fountain pen that should tame the problems encountered with the Tsuki-Yo. Sure enough the feathering happened less frequently and became almost imperceptible. The show-through was much less significant though the lines still looked a little wider than normal and the letters had smoother edges. Everything else I tested leaned toward the same results as the first pen and ink. Those combinations included Diamine Emerald in a Cross Solo in a fine cursive italic, Mont Blanc Violet in a Lamy Safari EF, Private Reserve Ebony Blue in a Lamy Al-Star 0.4mm cursive italic, and Sailor Brown in a Levenger True Writer F if you are keeping count. So the finer the nib and the drier it wrote, the better the performance on Wire-O paper.

To be fair I also tested three non-fountain pen instruments with much better results. A Sarasa Zebra 0.7mm rollerball performed beautifully as did a Pilot Hi-Tec-C 0.3mm with blue black ink. I held the latter very lightly as I would a fountain pen with lovely results.

My final test was with a Pentel mechanical pencil with o.5mm B lead and this is where the paper really shone. The pencil wrote very smoothly with virtually no pressure applied. It was just like using a fountain pen. The paper’s lack of tooth should make the lead last a very long time without sharpening as only a tiny amount of it is deposited with each stroke. Far and away the pencil is the best match for the Wire-O paper. In fact an unlined notebook might be fun for pencil sketches if you have a light hand.

My conclusion is that the Wire-O paper performs better than that famously feathering Moleskine but it is still finicky. Not in a class with Clairefontaine, Rhodia, Exacompta or Apica for fountain pen use but at $5.99 for 200 pages of non-wood 100 gsm paper it is a bargain. The variety of covers and the convenience of a product that lays perfectly flat add to its appeal. If you’ve just got to use a fountain pen, fine nibbed, dry-writing ones will perform best and possibly with hardly any feathering. Barnes & Noble and other bookstores carry them so they aren’t hard to find. If I awarded stars, Piccadilly Wire-O would get 2.5 of them for fountain pens and 4.5 for pencils and rollerballs (a half star deducted for the wire) and that’s not bad at all.