We’ve been both fans and customers of the Busy Beaver Button Co. since forever. They’ve made buttons for Pinsetter, for Field Notes, and for a lot of our personal projects, too. So when Michele said, “Would you want to go over and film with them?” we were immediately out the door. We hung out in their office for a couple of hours, talking to founder Christen Carter, and put together this short doc, hopefully capturing a little of the greatness that is Busy Beaver (and along the way, showing how a Field Notes button gets made).

Want a FIELD NOTES button? We’re including one (and other goodies) with every order!

We’re maybe not as hip to the new sounds as we used to be, but we know getting written up on Pitchfork still means something. According to the ‘Fork, we’re featured (or at least pictured) in The Report, a new zine/DVD/cassette/compilation thingy published by Chocolate Bobka. We don’t recognize a single damn artist on the tracklist, so it’s surely great and we’re ordering it right now to get in on the ground floor, like we wish we had with Slay Tracks.

P.S. Yes, that’s Jane’s Addiction in their trailer. Ironic? Not sure.

Speaking of our fingers, and their placement on the pulse, we’d never really thought about what boots match nicely with FIELD NOTES, but SLAMXHYPE kindly tells us we look good with Mark McNairy boots. McNairy seems to be all about reinventing the classics, so the pairing makes sense to us.

Thanks, to you, and you, and you, and YOU.

I’m a big fan of your notebooks and I was wondering what font you used when printing them.

Well, Antonio, we could talk about that all day! As you will find in the extensive technical specifications on the inside back cover of any FIELD NOTES memo book, we use the typeface FUTURA, designed by Paul Renner in 1927. You can learn more about Futura from Wikipedia or Typophile. It’s a versatile sans-serif typeface, and it has remained popular with designers since its inception. Renner was not associated with the Bauhaus, but Futura is definitely of the same clean, geometric, modern mindset.

Futura trivia:

• Futura Bold is used in a treatment eerily-similar to ours on Vampire Weekend albums.
• IKEA’s decision to switch from Futura to Verdana in their catalog and signage caused a huge stir in 2009.
• Director Wes Anderson is sort of obsessed with Futura. Most of the text in his films (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, etc.) is set in Futura.
• If you happen to have Futura installed on your computer, the headlines on FIELD NOTES BRAND website look a lot better (Otherwise, they’re in Helvetica!).

In calendar news, North Coast Zeitgeist have been big supporters of our FIELD NOTES calendars, hyping them a few times now. This year, NZ and their friends at Cranky Pressman put out their own great 2010 wall calendar and sent us a copy (above). Just as you can never have too many notebooks, you can never have too many handsome calendars.

(Start your collection with a limited-edition FIELD NOTES 2010 calendar, while they last!)

And last but not least, FIELD NOTES BRAND has been named as the presenting sponsor of The Morning News’ 2010 Tournament of Books, continuing Coudal Partners’ long involvement in the tournament. We’ll have much more news on that as spring approaches.

This weekend we got two emails, one from my old friend Zach Matthews, and one from Jim’s old pal David Sutton. Both were wandering the streets of Williamsburg in Brooklyn and saw our Mackinaw Autumn FIELD NOTES in a shop window. Both of them were thoughtful enough to send us an eerily similar photo (David’s is on the left, Zach’s is on the right). The shop in question is dijitalfix, which you may remember from Michele’s Brooklyn Field Trip. Thanks, David, Zach, and dijitalfix!

Limited-edition FIELD NOTES COLORS “Mackinaw Autumn” 3-Packs sold out in presale via our email list, but there are still a few available at selected retailers or via subscription.

Writer Tyler C Hellard used FIELD NOTES to chronicle two days without modern technology for Calgary’s Avenue magazine. Avenue sent more FIELD NOTES to illustrator Kelly Sutherland, who used them for a series of illustrations for Hellard’s story “The 48-Hour Luddite.” There’s a taste at Hellard’s blog Pop Loser, hopefully we can share the entire story when the magazine comes out next week.

A pack of new “Mackinaw Autumn” FIELD NOTES also inspired Sandro Rucci to briefly ignore his gadgets and write a lovely post about his new “Mackinaw Autumn” FIELD NOTES. Thanks!

And if you’re sensing a “back to nature” theme here, you’re right. Patrick Ng, from Hong Kong FN retailer City Super, came across a perfect complement to “Mackinaw Autumn” FIELD NOTES on a trip to Korea: the “Leaf It” kit, a series of leaf-shaped Post-It-type notes.

Here in our beloved midwestern U.S., the temperature is dropping, the winds are brisk, and real leaves are starting to change color and fall, providing us with an endless supply of colorful bookmarks. It’s our favorite time of year but it’s always too brief in Chicago, where it’ll start snowing in a week or two. Of course, we’ll have limited-edition FIELD NOTES COLORS ready for winter, too, don’t miss out, subscribe now!

We’ve got lots of internet love coming our way lately. The “FIELD NOTES in Action” Flickr group has been busy, including great photos from jcm5399, who used FIELD NOTES to draw a schematic (above) of his Les Paul (RIP), and Radioboy who created an ad-hoc FIELD NOTES puppet theater. Also on Flickr, Owash has included our notebooks in his cigar-box travel kit.

Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Bryan Monroe appeared on CNN with Anderson Cooper and Soledad O’Brien at the Michael Jackson memorial service, with FIELD NOTES in hand.

Nathalie Atkinson of the National Post included us in her great roundup of “Back to School” products for adults.

Designer Susan Connor collected some Girl Scout-esque tools for urban explorers, and we don’t have to tell you her notebook of choice.

Patrick Pittman explores “eight months and six continents worth of” FIELD NOTES, trying to remember why he wanted a replica 1954 World Cup referee shirt or why he would have noted 90s rapper DMX.

And finally, summing up our product with great eloquence, Blaine Hogan calls FIELD NOTES his idea capturing machine.”

Thanks, everyone, we truly appreciate the support! A few “GRASS STAIN GREEN” notebooks are still available through our FIELD NOTES COLORS subscriptions: get our limited-edition COLORS notebooks (and other goodies) four times a year before they sell out! Plus, we’ve got plenty of graphed, ruled, and plain notebooks in our online shop and at retailers worldwide!

A huge thank you to Edina and all the great folks at the Capsule Show that was held last week in New York. We met a ton of really cool people, handed out a bunch of samples and already have a mess of new stores that want to carry Field Notes. And we got some great press as well, thanks to the New York Times for the nice photo and shout out in their review of the show.