Staple Day 18

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

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Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our 18th 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: 2025, Boxers, Subscribe, Pen & Press, The Rooster, Bi-Coastal, Commonplace, Contest.

Three Out of Four

Our next three Quarterly Limited Editions are all in production. Two of them explore specific, largely unknown, chapters in the history of American design. The other is a collaboration with an author. We can’t wait to show you the notebooks and tell these stories. Winter, on the other hand, is totally up for grabs.

Outside the Box

There are many advantages to starting and maintaining a subscription to our Quarterly Limited Editions. The primary benefits are outlined on this page, along with links to the 65 limited editions we have created so far. We would appreciate it if you would consider joining the thousands of other folks who have come along on this ride with us.

In addition to the other benefits, the first shipment of every new subscription, or renewal, comes in a custom box. Each year we produce a new box by cajoling an artist we admire into creating something special. Our pitch goes something like this, “We will pay you to illustrate the exterior of these boxes and we will approve whatever crazy idea you have.” In our experience we have found that artists generally have an affection for money and freedom. So our plan works really well. Here are the complete transcripts of a couple of previous proposal meetings.

Artist: “I’m thinking of a whole mess of grade school desks.”
Us: “Great!”
Artist: “An astronaut and a old-fashioned deep sea diver.”
Us: “Perfect!”

Our 2025 Subscriber box was created by Chicago artist Landis Blair who describes himself as a “crosshatcher with a variety of other problems.” The box is on press right now and we’ll show it to you as soon as it arrives at HQ. Landis’s work is amazing, and his style is all his own. He also collects pencil sharpeners. Lots and lots of pencil sharpeners.

Fighting Words

Chicago artist and letterpress printer Jen Farrell of Starshaped Press took the words of Chicago writer/journalist Dan Sinker and made a print that makes an excellent point. By the way, Starshaped was one of the nine independent print shops that helped us create the “The United States of Letterpress” Edition in the fall of 2020. You can meet them all in this mini-documentary.

Bookapalooza

The 2025 Tournament of Books kicked off last week. We are the long-time sponsor of this yearly celebration of, and competition among, the year’s best novels. Each year we produce a custom memo book featuring the mascot of the tourney, a rooster.

Proceeds from the sale of this book are going to the American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans, which empowers people everywhere to stand up in the fight against censorship. There are fewer than 200 left for sale. The book was created and illustrated by the newest member of the FN Crew, designer Casey Rheault.

The Twain Shall Meet

Our limited-edition for the Spring of 2018 was the “Coastal” Edition, a celebration of the left and right edges of the U.S.A..

Each “Coastal” 3-pack displays an American coastline mapped across three memo books in two bright holographic foils, stamped and debossed into a “Cadet Gray” 100# cover stock from Neenah. When you line the three covers up vertically, “Coastal: East” reveals the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida. “Coastal: West” features the Pacific coast from Puget Sound to the Mexican border.

For the film accompanying “Coastal” we flew to JFK and then drove to Long Beach, New Jersey in the middle of the night, set up a camera at the shoreline and filmed a time-lapse sequence of the sun rising out of the Atlantic Ocean. Then we packed up, went back to JFK and caught a flight to LAX, where we rented a car and drove to Long Beach California, set up on the beach and captured a time-lapse of the same day’s sun setting into the Pacfiic Ocean.

That was fun.

The Whole Pasture Looked Like Our Meal

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.

“Porridge and delicious blueberries.”

Note: The Groundhog Day episode of This American Life was great all the way through. But one five-minute segment absolutely floored me. Producer Talia Augustidis asked the same question while setting audio levels to prepare for the recording of each episode of a radio show. “Act Two: I’ll Repeat the Question.”

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

Note: A long time ago, before Field Notes, we did a thing online titled Verse by Voice. We asked people to call a phone number and read their favorite poem into our voicemail. Lots of folks left us a message, including, to our surprise and delight, this one: Zadie Smith reads Frank O’Hara’s “Animals.”

Here’s the text of the poem. And, if you’ve never read it, Peter Schjeldahl’s obituary for O’Hara is remarkable. The Village Voice, 9/11/66.

Note to Self

Folks use Field Notes for all kinds of reasons but almost everyone uses them, at least occasionally, to jot down reminders to themself and I’m betting that we all use language and abbreviations that only we understand.

What’s something you’ve written in a Field Notes Memo Book that makes perfect sense to you but would be completely mysterious, and maybe even poetic, to someone else reading it? For example, last week I wrote myself a note that said “Lobby 10, Mayhem 11.” We were in Denver for a film shoot and had agreed to meet the person we were interviewing in the hotel lobby at 10am and drive to meet the crew at 11am on location, which was near the Mayhem Gulch Trailhead in Clear Creek Canyon. A beautiful place btw.

Send your “Note to Self” to [email protected] and include a short explanation. We’ll choose a dozen fun ones to publish and send those folks something very old and very sold-out from The Archives.

As always, thanks 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.