Staple Day 16

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our sixteenth monthly 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: Looking Ahead, Archive Packs, Joan (Again), No Erasing, So Bright, Amid Old Paintings, One Touch of Nature, 20ish.

Home and Away

We’re deep into research and pre-production for our Spring and Summer Quarterly Limited Editions for 2025. One is a deep dive into a fascinating chapter in typographic and design history that is tactile, hand-made, and very local. We’re excited for the final product to be announced but, as is frequently the case, we’re just as excited to tell, and show, the story of the people behind it.

The other project couldn’t be more different. Our partner is looking for the answer to a simple and important question and the search has taken him to amazing places. We consider ourselves lucky to have been invited to tag along.

Right now would be a very good time to start a year-long subscription to our Quarterly Limited Editions. Subscribers are the very heart of Field Notes. Your faith inspires us to be ambitious and take chances with what we make next. Just wait, you’ll see.

We Forget All Too Soon the Things We Thought We Could Never Forget

“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.”

Excerpts from and comments on Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook”, by Maria Popova. I have quoted Didion in previous Staple Days. I’m not done yet.

Onwards!

Jared Newman describes an under-appreciated benefit of writing notes on paper, in an essay for Fast Company.

“Perhaps best of all —at least for me— is that you can’t delete what you’ve written in ink. I’ve tried using an iPad with an Apple Pencil for handwritten notes and have reviewed a few digital writing tablets, and they always feel counterproductive to me. As an obsessive self-editor, I can’t resist the erase and undo tools that digital notepads provide. The only option with paper is to forge ahead.”

Raise High the Roofbeam

Over the course of the last couple years we have received a number of emails from wood-workers and other handy people that said, “Hey, I love your Carpenter Pencils but can you make them a bright color so they’re easy to spot in my toolbox?” Orange you glad we paid attention?

Ala Frescos

As noted in a previous Staple Day, I’m keeping a commonplace book† to record quotes that resonate with the present me, so that the future me knows where he’s been. Here are a couple recent entries.

“People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”

J. L. Carr, from A Month in the Country.

Note: The film of this just-about-perfect short novel features very early roles for Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh, and Natasha Richardson. It’s pretty good, but start with the book. Read it slowly, you only get one first time.

“What was beautiful in the painting was not like words, it was like paint — silent, direct, and concrete, resisting translation even into thought. As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest. And I didn’t know what to make of that.”

Patrick Bringley, from All the Beauty in the World.

Note: Guy quits his job at The New Yorker. Signs on as a museum guard at The Met. Stays ten years. Writes this amazing book.

We Get Mail

I journal incessantly and have done so for most my life. But these new ‘Birds and Trees of North America’ notebooks have changed my writing. I have designated them for only writing about intentional observations in nature. If I’m with my son fishing or at the park, these notebooks are reserved for documenting the movements of birds and squirrels, or of flowers and trees, or anything of the sort.

I’ve found, now, that they have increased the desire and, thus, the effort to intentionally pursue outings wherein I may write — and find some quiet from the cacophony of life. Thanks for that Dean.

Currently

The “Vintage” Edition, our limited release for winter that dropped a few weeks ago is, to me at least, a surprising hit. (I’m notoriously bad at predicting that sort of thing.) Also, “The Birds and Trees of North America” series is getting close to selling out. Maybe we should make more. What do you think?

Twenty Someething

As Bryan points out in a Dispatch published today, a case can be made for celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Field Notes this month. Or “an” anniversary anyhow. Whatever the date we appreciate the support of our customers, subscribers, partners, retailers, and you, for reading these long-winded updates.

^*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.

^† “A commonplace book is at once a book form and a method of reading. Commonplacing was a system of using books in which readers digested the books they read by extracting, ordering and recording particular phrases or passages in notebooks of their own.” –University of Chicago Library. For my current one I’m using a “Dime Novel” Edition.