Staple Day 23

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

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Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our 23rd 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: 50, Noted, Mystery, Independents’ Day, Mapping Time, Commonplace, Mid-Step, Relics.

Back When We Were Fifty

To celebrate our 50th Quarterly Limited Edition in 2021 we created an “Anniversary Desk Ledger.” This was just about the most complicated (and most fun) thing we’ve ever made. The book features six 16-page signatures with an exposed binding Smyth-sewn with silver and black thread. The first signature contains carefully die-cut pages of various French Paper colored paper stocks from past editions. A “By the Numbers” section indexes a slew of facts, trivia, and wisecracking. Next is an essay about the Quarterly Editions series, and then six “Top Ten” lists and a checklist to track your collection.

Initially, the physical “Desk Ledger” was a exclusive gift for subscribers who received the “Fifty” Edition as one of their subscription shipments. Currently, when folks sign up for The List (to receive these Staple Day mailings and other announcements) we send them a link to download a free digitial version of the Desk Ledger. It occurred to me that many of you have been on our Mail List for, like, ever. We appreciate that and if you’re interested, here’s the link to download that file.

This is The Way

In the late 1950s, longtime education professor Walter Pauk developed a method for taking lecture or reading notes. Known as “The Cornell Way,” his system helps clarify meanings, reveal relationships, establish continuity, and strengthen memory. It’s the simple act of dividing a page into three sections for notes, questions, and a summary that leads to the deeper understanding and greater retention of the material. Maybe we should make some lecture-specific note books?

The Staff Recommends

Let’s try out a new Staple Day feature in which we will periodically profile an independent book store. I’ll go first. It would be great if you’d like to nominate one to be included in the future. Email me a link and a few sentences about what your favorite shop means to you.

Note: Your store doesn’t have to carry Field Notes to be nominated, but if they don’t, you can be sure that the FN Crew is going to reach out to them.

A couple weeks ago I was in San Francisco to visit family and 180,000 other friends. One day we took a drive, wound up in Point Reyes Station, and stumbled into Point Reyes Books. I saw a guy methodically straightening the stacks, so I said hello and met Stephen Sparks, who owns the store with his wife Molly Parent. It’s a bright, welcoming spot that the SF Chronicle called “the platonic ideal of a modern indie bookstore.” We immediately hit it off when we started talking about Robert Macfarlane and Is a River Alive? See this profile in Alta for more about that. I’m proud to say they’re a long-time FN retailer.

Maps for Getting Lost

I’m always excited to quote a real, honest-to-goodness, personal blog, including this one. Here’s Nancy from Thoughts from the Back on Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?, our current Limited Edition, and the related, incredible maps made by Harold Fisk in the 1940s.

“Above are images of three of the map panels, courtesy of Field Notes (to whom I subscribed to a year’s worth of notebooks that I DO NOT NEED, just so I could get these three pictures and a mini-poster.) I love them. I want them as wallpaper somewhere in my house. I want to find them on display somewhere so I can spend hours staring at them. Making these personally meaningful to me, in the middle panel above is False River, an oxbow lake in Louisiana where my mother-in-law grew up and several members of her family still own property and live ‘on the island.’”

One Point Perspective

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. Here are a couple recent entries.

“In the same way that a river begins far before we meet it, I imagine this music starting long before I play the first note; I just have to join it.”

Note: Yo-Yo Ma plays Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, live from a glade in the Smoky Mountains. Sublime.

“I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten.”

Note: I recently re-read Wallace Stegner’s great novel, Angle of Repose and found it a very different book from the one I read years ago. I remember finding Lyman Ward, the protagonist, admirable but cranky and stuck in his ways. Now he seems less sure of himself, maybe even vulnerable. I guess that says as much about me as it does about him. In an interview Stegner said, “When I get through a book that involves some aspects of my own experience... I often don’t know myself what I invented and what I didn’t.”

The Gray and the Rain

In last month’s SD, as an aside, I posted a link to one of my favorite photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson. That got a reader’s attention and inspired a poem. Thanks for sharing Jason.

Also, an Excuse to Buy Cool Old Stuff

This is the original 1860’s Beadle Brothers Dime Novel that we purchased and used as a production and design reference while creating our limited edition of the same name in 2017.

Similarly, research into the origins of the American postcard industry sent us deep in the stacks at Chicago’s Newberry Library on a hunt for information and inspiration for the subscriber bonus postcard sets that accompanied 2022’s “Great Lakes” Edition.

We love exploring relatively obscure chapters in the history of American publishing, design, and printing, and then translating them into modern products that can tell their own story.

Later this year, our Winter Limited edition, along with a very special subscriber bonus item, will tell such a tale.

Now would be a very good time to start a year-long subscription. Our Fall release just went to press, and while it’s completely different than Winter, we’re pretty sure you’ll dig that one too. Good luck with the Mystery Boxes. Talk to you next month.

^*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.