Counting to Fifty

This essay appeared in “Fifty,” the Anniversary Desk Ledger, a gift to subscribers that was included along with their shipments of our Spring 2021 Quarterly 3-Packs.

YOU NEVER KNOW what will come from a casually made decision. I called my friend and occasional co-conspirator, Aaron Draplin, after he had sent me a handmade pack of kraft-colored “Field Notes,” and suggested that perhaps we should produce a short run of them and offer them for sale online. Within a couple weeks, we were up and running.

I certainly didn’t foresee that fourteen years later our advertising and design practice would have zero clients, our online advertising network and various other side projects would be shuttered, and the staff and I would be spending all of our time creating, manufacturing, marketing, and distributing a growing line of Field Notes Brand products.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret it a bit. I’m just a bit dumbfounded that it all happened.

Similarly, when we decided to expand the line in late 2008 by adding a couple new colorways, and shortly thereafter instituted an option by which customers could sign up to receive new and different quarterly “editions” via a year-long subscription, I had no idea I was setting the rhythm for the next dozen years of our creative lives. Aside from establishing a work schedule that caters to my own notoriously short attention span, the subscription model has some obvious and not-so-obvious benefits. For a small company, cash flow is always a challenge. Subscriptions are predictable, paid upfront, and they tend to even out income and expenses over the course of a calendar year. That’s all good.

The seasonal nature of our subscriptions gives us four excellent occasions each year to talk to, and interact with, our customers and our network of retailers. It also provides a compelling reason for folks to sign up for The List, our infrequent email newsletter, through which new releases are announced.

We enjoy working in secret on each release in order to spring it on the world, fully executed, on Launch Day. The “reveal” of each season’s release concentrates attention and fosters conversation. There is always something new at Field Notes and always something mysterious just around the corner. The unpredictability of what lies ahead energizes us as a team and adds drama to what is a simple commercial transaction.

Finally, having a base of subscribers allows us to print relatively large quantities of each seasonal release. This has the effect of lowering our cost-per-piece, which ultimately gives us the freedom to pursue more complicated production techniques, resulting in higher quality, more interesting products. As I’ve often said, subscribers are the very heart of Field Notes. Their faith gives us the freedom to take chances, and really, that faith is what makes the entire enterprise possible.

THE FORTY-NINE PREVIOUS QUARTERLY EDITIONS can be organized roughly into a few broad categories. This was never our intention. The creative process, like most everything else at Field Notes, is organic and chaotic, and the theme and character of any individual release is more often the result of happenstance and the need to satisfy our collective curiosity than it is to any long-term planning or preordained organization. But, the categories do provide an outline of our main priorities and add insight into what is most central to the brand, and what is most interesting to us, and hopefully, to our subscribers and customers.

LIKE HEADWATERS THAT STREAM DOWNHILL, quickened with snowmelt, to gather and flow into a large river, multiple inspirations sometimes result in a single release. An early spring drive along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a chance encounter with Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, and the power and poetry of the name itself resulted in the edition we called “Shenandoah.”

The first category to explore is the most obvious; Nature and the Seasons. From the releases that fit here, full yearly cycles can be assembled. Maybe start with a spring planting of marigold seeds from “Packet of Sunshine.” Gather around the “Campfire” after a summer hike. The colors and shapes of “Autumn Trilogy” give way to the wintery gradient that is “Cold Horizon.” When we first start planning a future edition, how it will fit with the season of its release is considered. The earliest editions, like “Mackinaw Autumn,” “Just Below Zero,” and “Balsam Fir” tend to follow seasonality in an explicit way. But even a release like “Night Sky,” which focuses on an aspect of the natural world, may include some seasonal detail. The holographic foil sky map arrayed across the backs of the three “Night Sky” books depicts the constellations most prominent in the North American sky in early, mid, and late summer.

Figuring out the production process for another nature-based edition, “Coastal,” was painstaking. The idea was to print a topographic map of the Atlantic coastline of the United States across the three covers in a pack, so when you laid them out vertically they’d all fit together, and you’d see the entire East Coast. And then to do the same with the West Coast on a second pack. On top of all that we wanted create the map by laying holographic foil inside embossed channels. Bryan spent hours testing and revising until we had it all set to go.

Figuring out the film was simpler. It went something like this: I asked, “Could we film the sun rising out of the Atlantic, hop a flight, and film the same day’s sun setting into the Pacific?” I believe Steve’s initial response was, “I’m down for that.”

It has been suggested that we are selling notebooks as simply a means to finance our filmmaking. And there’s a bit of truth there. Most of the time, as with “Coastal,” the idea for an edition comes first and then we decide what will work best for the accompanying film. However there have been times when it happens the other way around.

I suppose you can see what caught my eye about the title of Philip Connors’ excellent memoir, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout. A discussion of the book sparked some research about Midwestern fire spotters and we were excited to discover that two Aermotor Company Fire Lookout Towers from the 1930s were still standing, and one was just four hours north of us in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin. And we were even more excited to realize that if we acted quickly we could film the tower, and from the tower, at the height of the autumn leaves changing. And, oh yeah, we could make some Memo Books too.

YOU WANT TO DO WHAT, NOW? We’ve heard that question, or one like it, from printers and other suppliers quite a few times. In this case, it came in response to our request to purposefully knock the four printing plates out of alignment before we began printing the covers for the “America the Beautiful” Edition. We were after a “beautiful mistake” that would look as if the books had been printed in an era where halftone dots were clearly visible and out-of-register printing was common due to the limits of early four-color offset printing technology.

The second category to explore is “Forensic Design.” Bryan coined this term to describe the process of dissecting vintage print ephemera and investigating the historical techniques and processes that can be used, or simulated, in the production of our products as a way to pay tribute to the traditions of American printing, publishing and design.

Where it is not physically possible to employ a specific printing style or technique, our aim is to reproduce it honestly, in an analog manner wherever we can. For example, for “America the Beautiful,” it would have been relatively simple to fake the out-of-register effect we were looking for in Photoshop, and then print the faked image conventionally. But there’s beauty in mistakes made properly, and while we’re here to create and sell notebooks, we’re also here to learn.

There is one last detail I love about “America the Beautiful.” While looking for subtly off-white cover stock to simulate paper that had yellowed with age, our printer tracked down a palette of coated-one-side stock that had been sitting in a warehouse for years, and had yellowed naturally. It made a perfect complement to what Aaron called “our gorgeously shitty covers.”

“Raven’s Wing,” “Two Rivers,” and “The United States of Letterpress” were all produced on lovingly maintained, vintage printing presses. The print run for “Raven’s Wing” in the fall of 2010 was 5,000 3-packs, and while that was a big job for a one-man shop, it was doable. By the time we got to “Two Rivers,” which was done in combination with, and to raise funds for, the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum, the run was 27,500 and we had to build a couple months into the schedule for all 82,500 covers to be printed in two passes each, by hand.

As our print runs have increased, it’s become increasingly difficult to employ old-school processes. Michele solved that problem for “The United States of Letterpress” by suggesting we feature the the work of a variety of independent letterpress shops from across America. Matt got busy contacting our network of letterpress friends, signing up nine printers to do the covers, and a couple more to further distribute the workload.

Two brothers, an important technological breakthrough, and favorable postal regulations combined in 1860s New York to ignite the American paperback book industry.

A random click on an image of vintage typography led to a flurry of research, a hasty purchase of an overpriced historical artifact, and eventually, the “Dime Novel” Edition, our effort to revisit the form, style, and voice of a remarkable chapter in American publishing history.

The films for these three letterpress editions and “Dime Novel” are instructive and demonstrate what we mean by Forensic Design. They also show the kindness, enthusiasm, and ingenuity of people who have dedicated some part of themselves to studying and preserving the old way of doing things.

LIKE SNOWFLAKES, every Field Notes Memo Book is different. For the “Snowy Evening” Edition, that’s literally true. But what truly makes every Field Notes unique are the notes we write to ourselves on its 48 pages.

The techniques we resurrected from history were exciting, new, technological marvels at the time they were introduced. Contemporary commercial printing continues to advance, and the next category to explore is Innovation. Digital printing, new papers, inks, and capabilities have provided us with opportunities to create surprising editions.

For the winter of 2020, we combined algorithm-based computer generative artwork with digital printing technology to produce a run of 99,999 beautiful, individual cover designs. “Snowy Evening” was created with the help of artist and technologist Brendan Dawes. The “Snowy Evening” we were initially inspired by was created by Robert Frost.

Super-thin American Cherry wood veneer affixed to a substrate of kraft paper became the covers of the “Shelterwood” Edition. Of course everyone knows that paper is made from wood, but for this 2014 release, the covers were made of wood.

Coated in a nearly magical “photochromic” silkscreen ink that changes color when exposed to ultraviolet rays, the “Snowblind” Memo Book cover is a subtle white until you take it outside into the bright sunshine, where it slowly turns a dusty shade of baby blue.

An innovative synthetic paper produced by Yupo in Chesapeake, Va. became the virtually indestructible “Expedition” Edition. To be sure that these were Everything-Proof, we ran a fun and only somewhat-dangerous battery of twelve (reasonably) scientific tests in the F.N. Labs.

“PEOPLE WHO LIKE THIS SORT OF THING will find this exactly the sort of thing they like.” This quip has been credited to Artemus Ward, Abraham Lincoln, George Bernard Shaw, and various other people. No matter who said it first, for us, it’s a funny way to define another category of Quarterly Editions, those based on Allied Interests.

Nature, the seasons, and the history and technology of American design and publishing are natural themes for Field Notes. They reflect the brand’s original inspiration, the tradition of promotional memo books distributed to American farmers over the last hundred years by seed, tractor, and other agricultural companies.

Along the way, we’ve adopted other uniquely American institutions that fit particularly well with the Field Notes voice and style.

Major League Baseball inspired the “Day Game” 3-Packs and Kevin Guilfoile’s memoir A Drive into the Gap. The ephemera and iconography of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Highway System, and Americans’ love of road trips, brought about “Mile Marker.”

As the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing approached, we created the “Three Missions” Edition to celebrate the space programs (Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo) that got us there.

We made a 3-Pack, some “Punch-Out and Assemble” Mission-Specific Crew Capsule Models, and one of our most ambitious films ever. Steve, Bryan, and Erica spent countless hours planning and then executing the launch of one of our model capsules into space over Iowa, all in order to record twenty seconds of video.

For as long as we have been making Field Notes, people have been writing to ask us to make a series based on America’s National Parks. I’m not especially patient. I’d always rather do something right away and see what happens than wait and plan and discuss it.

In this case however, it paid off to bide our time until just the right opportunity arose. A partnership with The Fifty-Nine Parks Print Series begat our first three “National Parks” 3-Packs in the summer of 2019, and since then we’ve added three more. Gorgeous illustrations, combined with a bespoke printing technique that takes advantage of a range of colored cover stocks from the French Paper Company, allowed us to have our Parks Series fit within the NPS’s long history of posters, postcards and promotional material, especially the WPA era designs that are so deeply entwined in the identity of “America’s Best Idea.”

DESPITE ALL THE THEMES, COLORS, SHAPES AND SIZES, the one thing that every Quarterly Edition must be is practical. As Aaron originally described it, a Field Notes is “an honest memo book, worth fill-in’ up with good information.”

The releases that fall into the broad category of Tools and Tasks take into account ever more specific practical considerations. There’s nothing we like better than taking a standard format and questioning every dimension, paper choice, and detail, and then re-engineering it so that it’s more useable, more attractive and more fun. In one case the format was the classic Reporter’s Notebook, and its reinvention, our “Byline” Edition.

Everyone has their favorite Field Notes products. My desk has never been without one of our Steno Books since the very day we first got them delivered from the printer, way back when. Once we started playing around with doing a Memo Book sized version, we immediately had a “we should have done this a long time ago” moment. In its own way, I think “Heavy Duty” is a just-about-perfect Field Notes product. Unpretentious, useful and reliable, we might have to make more of those.

“Measure twice, cut once.” A simple phrase that kicked off a box set of notebooks called the “Workshop Companion.” Each of six books focuses on one DIY discipline — Wood Working, Automotive, Gardening, Painting, Plumbing, and Electrical — and is full of handy tips and reference materials. Like the U.S.A. Highway Map that accompanied the “Mile Marker” Edition, and the “Arts and Sciences” Edition, our aim is frequently to strike a balance between helpful, useful information and a healthy dose of Field Notes wise-cracking.

FOUR TIMES EACH YEAR, we create a project for ourselves and then we get busy. So long as we find rabbit holes to jump down, curiosities to investigate, and obscure, surprising themes and techniques to try, we’ll keep at it.

I want to thank Aaron for his ongoing contributions, inspiration, enthusiasm, and especially for spreading the gospel of Field Notes far and wide. The HQ Crew has built this into a real business without sacrificing any of the fun we had when we were just beginning to mess around with it. For that I am eternally grateful to Michele, Bryan, Steve, Dawson, Matt, Trina, Shea, Joe, and Erica.

And, of course, thanks to our customers, retailers, printers, artists, experts, partners, and especially our subscribers. We would never have gotten to fifty without you. Here’s to the next fifty. Mark your calendar. If all goes well, our 100th Quarterly Edition will be launching in the Summer of 2033.