Staple Day 21

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

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Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our 21st 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: Fast Co, This Monday, Riverrun, Box it Up, Grads, Johannes & Frank, Next.

Seasonal Effective Order

Aaron Draplin and I sat down for a really fun interview about Field Notes with Zac Petit for Fast Company. It was just published yesterday. My mom would definitely have had something to say about me dropping an f-bomb in a national magazine. I don’t doubt I said it, but I am a little surprised they printed it. To be fair though, it does accurately convey our excitement about the 2010 event we were discussing.

Doing a little research for background material for the piece, I came up with this. Since we started our subscription service and quarterly limited releases, we have made 67 seasonal editions. Seven of those are still currently in stock. Five have been adapted to become part of our regular line of products. In order: Expedition, Front Page, National Parks, Heavy Duty, and The Birds and Trees of North America. The other 55 editions are sold out, never to be re-issued. And, just totaling up the original print runs for the 67 editions, we have produced well north of five million note books.

Since 2010, we also have made a film for just about every release and some of those are what we’re screening this coming...

Monday, Monday

If you’re in the area or can get here quick, on Monday, June 23rd at 7pm, join us for a screening of selected films at the first, and likely only, Field Notes Film Festival at Chicago’s incomparable Music Box Theatre. Tickets are $35 and include admission, plus one of just 700 special Festival 2-Packs, each hand-letterpressed by the Field Notes crew. Tickets available via Eventbrite.

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.

Meandering

Our current Quarterly Limited Edition was created with artist Stanley Donwood and author Robert Macfarlane, whose book, Is a River Alive? features Donwood’s cover art, which was inspired by 1940s maps of the historical course of the Mississippi River, created by surveyor and cartographer Harold Fisk. Field Notes subscribers are also receiving a Fisk Map reproduction with their summer shipment. Here’s a passage from the book.

Fisk “had found a means of representing in a single image the many past lives of this huge and wilful river. He had mapped the Mississippi’s memories.”

“Fisk’s fifteen plates, tracking the meander plain contiguously from north to south, are works of art. In them, the Mississippi comes to life: rising like mating snakes, writhing with river ghosts. Seen in Fisk’s catographic imagination, plotted colourfully across both time and space, the Mississippi becomes an itinerant, wandering being.”

Tangentially Related: Watch this excellent video from Practical Engineering on the unintended consequences of trying to control the course of rivers.

Pomp and Circumstance

In the spring we frequently get mail inviting us to weddings where our notebooks are used for writing vows, or as wedding-party gifts, or even to indicate seating assignments. Then, in early summer we always get a slew of graduation announcements from students who have used Field Notes in their studies. Like so.

“I’m proud to share my law school graduation with you. Through lectures, court observations, and moments of sudden inspiration (or complete panic), my Field Notes were never far from reach. They captured half-baked arguments, quotes from professors, and the occasional existential crisis scribbled in the margins.”

“In a world full of distractions, there’s something grounding about putting pen to paper. Those little note books held the chaos together. Thanks for being a constant companion on my journey.” Thanks for sending a handwritten (natch) note Kimberly A., now also J.D..

Time, Water, Sunshine

As noted in previous Staple Days, 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. I’m using a “Dime Novel” for the task. Here are a couple recent entries.

“In front of a Vermeer woman exactly turning her head, reading a letter, pouring milk, trying on a necklace in a mirror, raising a glass, we become aware of the flow of time itself. That is why the light seems like water.”

Note: From John Berger’s Selected Essays from 1966. Also, if you’ve never watched it, Berger’s BBC series, “Ways of Seeing,” is a good place get aquainted with his work. Also, his other collection, Portraits, is available in a beautiful edition from Verso Press.

“I talk to the sun when I need sun. I talk to the clouds when I need clouds, and the rain, and the moon and the stars, I talk to all of Mother Nature’s creations. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t, but at least they know my intentions.” —Farmer Frank

Note: Filmmaker Megan Sweeney of Big Heart Films, reached out to us a while back and shared a rough cut of a sequence from a documentary she is working on. One thing led to another and we’re helping to finance her post-production work. Here’s the trailer for Talking to the Sun, which she describes as “a short documentary of astronomical proportions.”

Onwards

We’re working on our Fall and Winter limited editions. The more we learn about the story behind the Winter release, the more we can’t believe that we had never heard anything about it at all. That’s thanks to FN Designer Casey Rheault, who, on one of his first days at HQ, casually asked Bryan and I, “Have you ever seen one of these?” You will be very happy to already be a year-long subscriber when that one rolls around.

As usual, we’re taking Fridays off between Memorial Day and Labor Day. A note to other bosses; The secret is that we don’t work 25% harder or longer Monday through Thursday to make 4-day weeks successful, we just screw around 25% less. Cheers,

^*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.