What the Field Notes Brand Corporate Grain Elevator would look like, if there ever were such a thing. From the LoC archives.

We got a nice package in the mail today from our friends at J Crew, their latest catalogue. When we got to pages 94-95 and saw that our Field Notes Memo Books were featured with such iconic brands as Timex, Sperry, Ray Ban, and Belstaff, we just about fell over. J Crew has been with us for a long while, they started by carrying us in their awesome men’s shop, The Liquor Store in Tribeca and we sure do appreciate their support. Oh and our kids dig them too.

Eben Lindsay took a few photos and wrote us. Fishing that day was fantastic. We were at the Lower Stanislaus River outside of Oakdale Ca. It was the kind of beautiful California weather that, as an East Coast transplant still amazes me in January. The fishing was good for January, and the light was great for photography. At lunch I took a few minutes to make some notes in my FIELD NOTES about what flies were working and what parts of the river were productive. When I got home I sketched out the best pool and made notes about the current and where in the pool the fish were holding. Thanks for that.

If you’re a FIELD NOTES spotter/completist (and we know there are some of you out there) you may be horrified to learn that we’ve been supplying customized FIELD NOTES to various friends and other cool people for the past couple years. Your complete collection is NOT complete (in fact, neither is ours, we can’t find a copy of the fourth printing ANYWHERE).

Generally, we don’t make a big deal about it, but one of our recent printings is too cool not to mention, and a handful of them are available to the public through a contest this weekend.

Surely you’re familiar with Threadless, the t-shirt empire? They asked us to make them some custom FIELD NOTES 3-Packs featuring one standard French Dur-o-Tone “Packing Brown Wrap,” one Pop-Tone “Berrylicious,” and one Pop-Tone “Sour Apple.” The best part is the paper inside, which features a t-shirt with a graph overlay.

You want these. You need them, right? Well, we printed up a bunch, and we’re not sure what they’re going to do with most of them, but they’re giving away ten on a flickr contest that’s running all weekend. So hurry up and enter, and if you don’t win, you know to keep an eye on Threadless, maybe they’ll let a few more out into the wild soon.

We’ve done a couple other particularly awesome custom versions lately, and there are a few more about to go to press, so hopefully we’ll be able to tell you about those soon. Oh, by the way, do you follow us on Twitter?

Last Wednesday we offered a free FIELD NOTES Mixed 3-Pack to anyone ordering anything from Coudal.com. Response was positive, to say the very least, and we had a busy few days filling all the orders. A few cheapskates ordered six pencils for $3.49 to get their free 3-Pack, but hey, the deal said “anything,” and we stood by it. Ain’t nothing wrong with taking advantage of a good deal.

Here at FN HQ, we all buckled down and packed orders (in my case, forgetting the free 3-Pack half the time and having to re-pack orders). All the bulging kraft-paper envelopes were traveling to points all over the globe by Friday morning, and we’ve started to see the usual (and appreciated!) blog postings, emails, flickr photos, and such that accompany any FIELD NOTES mailing blitz. As just one example, Tom Zeigler of NYC sent the photo above of our “FN-09 General Purpose Band of Rubber” TOTALLY DOMINATING his rubber band ball.

If you missed out on this surprise offer (it was a surprise even to us until Wednesday morning), you’ll certainly want to sign up for our mailing list, up there in the top left corner of the page. If an occasional email is too much to bear, try our RSS feed (but only the mailing list gets new COLORS presale announcements!).

I got a nice email from one Sarah Smarsch just as summer was coming to a close. She and her husband-to-be were going to be using Field Notes for their wedding vows! Here’s what she had to say,

“You see, because of the style and class that Field Notes brand possesses, we chose to use the little books to write our wedding vows in.  Ideas became drafts and drafts became our spoken promises to one another.”

Now if that doesn’t stick to yer ribs, I don’t know what will.

We can’t tell you how proud this makes us feel, seeing our little memo books get the job done in one of the biggest moments in a couple of lovebird’s lives. Hell, I’m crying big ol’ crocodile tears as there words go to print.

We wish you kids nothing but the best, with long, long lives and 14 beautiful, bouncing babies; who all learn how to write on the pages of Field Notes memo books.

Durable words on durable pages, people!

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.