Staple Day 24

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

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Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our 24th 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: All Hands, Big Days, Some Advantage, Flash Sale, River Bridge, And... Action, C’mon By.

Gang Activity

I write a lot of copy, headlines, film scripts, and of course, these newsletters. But Field Notes demands much more than any single writer can produce.^† For example, just about every edition we create includes 30-90 “Practical Applications,” a specific list of suggested uses for our notebooks that appears on the inside back cover. Including our Quarterly Releases, our regular line of products, and a whole slew of custom books we’ve made for various organizations and brands, I figure we’ve written somewhere north of 7,000 practical apps to date. The only way to keep that going is with the hive mind.

Bryan is usually the master of apps. He starts a shared spreadsheet and everybody pitches in. Then it’s a matter of curating the contributions to produce the final list. Copywriting by committee is employed in other situations too. For our “Dime Novel” Edition we wanted to include a list of “Other Publications” in the same way the Beadle Brothers promoted their own back catalog in the 1860s. The result was 177 titles, mostly inside jokes about Field Notes, written in the breathless, overheated style of the originals.

The reverse side of the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways Map, that was a subscriber bonus to accompany the the “Mile Marker” Edition, was also a collective wise-cracking project. It featured 28 panels completely jammed with useful, sorta useful, and some fun-but-not-at-all-useful information. Another example of us going on, and on, is the back of our yearly Workstation Calendars. Aaron started the tradition of including a list of “Big Days” on the back, and every year since Dawson has managed, and selected from, a growing database of important dates. Seriously, how else would you know that second of February is the anniversary of the 1874 issuance of a patent for Samuel Francis’ spork?

So You Know: As of this morning, our 2026 Workstation Calendar is available for purchase.

Our upcoming Fall Edition contains a list of seasonal Practical Apps, natch. Producing 0ur 2025 Winter Edition and its related subscriber bonus item requires special attention and a ton of text. So, we brought in long-time co-conspirator, novelist Kevin Guilfoile, as editor-in-chief for the project. Start a subscription today. You won’t regret it.

A Troublesome Thing

“It is a troublesome thing for a lazy man to take notes, so I used to try in my young days to pack my impressions in my head. But that can’t be done satisfactorily, so I went from that to another stage – that of making notes in a note-book. But I jotted them down in so skeleton a form that they did not bring back to me what it was I wanted them to furnish. Having discovered that defect, I have mended my ways a good deal in this respect, but still my notes are inadequate. However, there may be some advantage to the reader in this, since in the absence of notes, imagination has often to supply the place of facts.” Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, Volume I 1855-1873. Via Notebook Stories.

Overflow

Pam writes, “The Bestoff Sculpture Garden, at the New Orleans Museum of Art, has this beautiful bridge on their grounds. When we were there, I spent some time looking at the flow and the water below... Once again, Field Notes melds with my life!”

Note: The artist is Elyn Zimmerman and like us, and our collaborator Robert Macfarlane, she was inspired by the maps made by Harold Fisk in the 1940s. The project is titled Mississippi Meanders. It’s a lovely installation, and perfect for a city so deeply entwined with the Big River. If you haven’t yet, pick up a 3-pack, or start a subscription with, our current seasonal release, The “Is a River Alive?” Edition.

More Than One Direction

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.

“Exit, pursued by a bear.”

Note: On Saturday afternoon, I was fortunate to attend a performance of Shakepeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin. It was great and I enjoyed seeing Shana Cooper’s dramatization of the most famous stage direction in theatrical history. I’m pretty sure Antigonus did not feel the same way.

Related: Listen to actor David Tennant’s debut on Radio 4’s Just a Minute, a long-running game show in which the contestants are challenged to speak for one minute on a random subject without hesitation, deviation, or repetition.

“So the fact that there’s someone who’s planning what happens to the characters, writing it down, means that the characters always have a fate. And when we think about fate, we tend think of it as the thing we would have if we were literary characters, that is, if there were somebody out there, writing us.”

Note: From a Guernica Magazine interview with Daniel Kehlmann. His novel, The Director, is my favorite book of the year. I hope to see it in the 2026 Tournament of Books.

Around the Big Table

A heads up on future events at HQ so you can plan a visit.

Our Fall Limited Edition will be announced in a couple weeks and we’ll be hosting a Launch Party Happy Hour at HQ from 4-7 on Thursday, September 25th. We’re taking part in one of the the city’s great fall traditions, Open House Chicago, on October 18 and 19. Our annual Holiday Market at HQ will be the weekend of December 13th. Looking forward to seeing you.

Thanks to everyone who bought a Mystery Box last month and especially those of you who shared your unboxing online. That was fun and maybe we’ll do it again sometime. We’d appreciate it if you’d consider joining the thousands of year-long Field Notes subscribers. As always, for our Fall release, sub shipments go first.

Spoiler alert. Maybe you missed this on Insta yesterday.

^*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.

^† Field Notes is, and will always be, 100% A.I.-free. We proudly take full responsibility for our own hallucinations.