Staple Day 14

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

Sign up for The List to receive Staple Day* mailings first, right to your inbox every month.

Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our fourteenth monthly-ish newsletter containing a variety of stuff that doesn’t really fit anywhere else. Please respond to this email if you have comments, questions, or suggestions.

TLDR Version: Partners, Laughing Jays, Making Mistakes, Register Redux, James & Calvin, Typecast, Shopapalooza.

Allied Forces

Since the last Staple Day we have announced our collaboration with GOT BAG on the new “Pitch Black Rolltop Backpack,” which was born like many of our concepts, by chance. We were pitching our products to retailers at a Chicago trade show focused on men’s fashion. On the last day, traffic was pretty light so we walked around to say hello to some of the other brands and struck up a conversation with our eventual co-conspirators at GOT, which led to a meeting for drinks at HQ and a quick agreement to make something together.

We had always wanted to do some sort of Field Notes backpack, but never found one we felt really good about. Until now. The bags are made from recycled materials, including ocean plastic collected by GOT BAG’s clean-up programs in 17 Indonesian communities. They’re beautiful and functional.

Next week, we’ll be announcing another collab that has been in the works for a while. At Field Notes we pay special attention to other small and medium sized brands, and the way they talk about their process and products, the attention they pay to details and the importance they place on story telling. In a lot of the collaborative things we have done, we started out as lurkers, and then customers, before we became partners. Stay tuned.

Bird is the Word

Of course we’re always happy when a product connects with people. The reception to “The Birds and Trees of North America” has been especially gratifying. We have received a ton of comments from folks excited to learn about Rex Brasher, who The Washington Post referred to as “The greatest bird artist you’ve never heard of.”

While it’s his lifetime of paintings that get the most attention, Rex’s writings and personal observations allow us to get to know him a bit. And the birds too.

“Blue Jays have a sense of humor. I have watched them play tag with small hawks and their notes of derision when a hawk missed its swoop, were as close to laughter as birds can voice.”

If you haven’t already, please take eight minutes to watch our mini-documentary and meet Rex Brasher and the Rex Brasher Association.

Bad Intentions

Bryan coined the term “Forensic Design” to describe the process of dissecting vintage print ephemera and investigating the historical techniques and processes that can be used, or simulated, during production 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 2013’s “America the Beautiful” Edition, 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, so we asked our printer to mess up the alignment of the cyan “film” on press, to give us the mushy, slightly screwed-up effect we were after.

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

Note: This entry is adapted from an essay in Fifty, the Anniversary Desk Ledger that subscribers received with shipments of our 50th Quarterly Limited Edition in 2021. Check it out here.

Sidewalks of New York

As noted in a previous Staple Day, I have started a commonplace book to record quotes, lyrics, poems, and conversations that resonate with the present me, so that the future me knows where he’s been. Here are a couple recent entries.

“I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, ‘Look.’ I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, ‘Look again,’ which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw.”

James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78, The Paris Review. Early in Baldwin’s career Beauford Delaney mentored and encouraged him. Later, when Delaney was struggling Baldwin provided him support and protection. Learn more about their relationship in this piece by Victoria L. Valentine, written to coincide with a 2020 exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art.

Note: I have subscribed to The Paris Review for years and love the print editions. Having online access to their archive of in-depth writer interviews going back to the 1950s is also a great benefit.

“The chicken plays every day.”

While reading Calvin Trillin’s new collection of essays, The Lede, I was reminded of his New Yorker piece in which he describes taking friends to Chinatown to play tic-tac-toe against a chicken. They would look at the arrangements and say, “But the chicken gets to go first.” He would respond, “He’s a chicken. You’re a human being. Surely there’s some advantage in that?” Then some of them would say, “Yeah, but I haven’t played in years, the chicken plays every day.”

Thank You Mr. Renner

I had a lot of fun talking about Field Notes and related subjects with Carl Unger on Monotype’s Creative Characters podcast recently. Of course, I had a few things to say about the Futura typeface.

Futura has a unique combination of serious, announcement, public information, even governmental official-ness, but at the same time there is some warmth and maybe even a kind of a smile to it. Especially when you set it with healthy letterspacing and let it breathe a little bit. Futura is challenging in the text weights but I think it really wants to be all caps. Like “I’ll bring all the other clothes with me on vacation but every day I wind up wearing this sweatshirt.”

Next Up

Our winter limited edition is on press right now and will be announced in a few weeks. No spoilers except to say that people who like this sort of thing will find it exactly the sort of thing they like.

If you’re in Chicago or can get here, we’ll be hosting a Holiday Market with friends at HQ in Chicago on December 7th and 8th. Full details soon. Thanks, as always, for paying attention.

Coined a long time ago in the Field Nuts Facebook group, “Staple Day” is traditionally observed when a writer reaches the exact middle of a Field Notes Memo Book, revealing the metal fasteners which bind the cover and the interior pages together.