Staple Day 20

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 20th 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. You can find recent Staple Days here.

TLDR Version: FNFF, Robot Wisdom, HOMES, Daisy, Fifty, Dickerson, River and Sky, Onwards.

Movie Night

Starting with this stop-motion recap from 2009, we have produced films to accompany the launch of almost all of our Quarterly Editions. We are currently editing a film, shot in The Rocky Mountains, for our next seasonal release, our 67th.

The total running time for all of our films is well over ten hours. That includes “The Stars and Their Courses,” the 6 hour and 20 minute film, shot from dusk to dawn at Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada for the “Night Sky” Edition. Fun fact: Twelve years ago, the only way we could get the hi-def file uploaded to YouTube was to walk a hard drive from HQ to Google’s Chicago offices, a couple blocks away.

Anyhow, we’ve always wanted to see these films projected in a movie theater, and not just in any theater, but in the crown jewel of Chicago movie houses. The incomparable Music Box.

So, we reached out to the crew at the theater (and sent them a case of our Chicago 3-Packs to help sweeten the deal) and came to an agreement. On Monday, June 23rd at 7pm, join us for a screening of selected films in the first, and likely only, Field Notes Film Festival. Tickets are $35 and include admission, plus one of just 700 special Festival 2-Packs, each hand-letterpressed by the Field Notes crew. So you know, the only way to get the FNFF Edition is to attend the screening.

We have some other surprises and special guests lined up and we’d love to see you there. Staple Day readers are hearing about this first and tickets are on sale right now.

Pregame: FN co-founder Aaron Draplin will be here for the festival and HQ in Chicago will be open to everyone on Monday the 23rd from 10am to 3pm. Come on by to say hello, pick up some merch, and browse the Rarities Shelf. We’ll dig deep in the archives to find editions that line up with films that will be featured at the screening.

When You Fill One, the Next Will Come^TM

We come across many reviews of our products online and frequently they’re in languages that we need to read via machine translation. Sometimes the results are, like this from a Slovakian site, simply charming.

Clean, lined or square notebooks are mostly sold in packs of three pieces. When you fill one, the next will come. Thanks to their modest size and weight, they can also be packed peacefully on their way.

Thanks to the Twenty-Four People Who Wrote or Posted to Say That We Should Have Called Them “Field Totes”

We had a last-minute idea for a Mother’s Day gift and turned it around in about ten days, combining a simple summer canvas Tote Bag and a custom matching Memo Book. The back side of “This Summer’s Tote” features a list of Practical Applications,^‡ the last of which is that it can serve as a handy place to store all your other tote bags. The initial run sold out in two days. We’re taking pre-orders for the next batch, which should arrive next week.

Everything Except the Dot-Grid Pages

We’ve made a digital version of our 50th Anniversary Desk Register, to serve as a gift for folks who sign up to receive these Staple Day newsletters and other news. The Register contains an index, polls, history, anagrams, a gallery, and plenty of wise-cracking. We do appreciate that you are already on The List and if you’d like, you can download that file.

The Essential Transaction

Over the years people frequently asked us to make a Reporter’s Notebook and one person in particular was adamant about it.

“What I do is centered around a single thing. It’s a notebook. To me it’s the most elemental part of what I love about my work, coming up with questions to ask people that will then get answers that are worthy enough to be written down. That’s the essential transaction… the fundamental instrument at the center of the way I do my job.” We filmed a chat with reporter, author, and CBS News anchor, John Dickerson in his DC office about developing the original “Byline” Edition together. That edition is now a regular part of our product line, titled “Front Page.”

Under Water and Outer Space

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.

“Fuck, it’s Caesar.”

Note: In her book Twelve Caesars, Mary Beard quotes the leader of a team of French archaeologists dragging the Rhône River at Arles, after they unexpectedly pulled out a marble head. Beard notes that this “probably captures his surprise better than any other, more polite, translation.”

“How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf.”

Note: I was late to read Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital, the Booker Prize winner from last year. I sat down with it on a rainy day recently and didn’t move until I was finished. It is astonishing. It’s one of those books where the less you know about it going in, the better the experience will be. Despite that, here’s a fun interview with Harvey, by Lisa Allardice for The Guardian.

The Road Ahead

Our limited edition for summer will drop the week of May 19th. We can’t wait to share it with you. Fall is in the works, and Winter involves a ton of production testing, writing, editing, and historical research. So we’re having a blast with that. Please consider joining the thousands of folks who are along for the ride as subscribers. As we’ve said many times, 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.

Thanks for reading. I hope you can join us for the Music Box Screening on Monday, June 23rd. Go ahead and have a long weekend in Chicago, or as the Sun-Times described it this morning, the city of Da Pope.

^*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.

^† There’s a strong Chicago connection and a nerdy and interesting story behind the history and reproduction of the postcards. Read Bryan’s “Greetings from the Shores.”

^‡ Just about every Field Notes Memo Book ever made has included a list of Practical Applications on the inside back cover. They are usually specific to the theme of the book, and sometimes pretty obscure. We have written thousands of them and someday we’re going to collect them all in one place. But today is not that day.