Staple Day 28

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

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Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our 28th monthly newsletter containing a variety of stuff that doesn’t really fit anywhere else. Please respond to this email with comments, questions, or suggestions. I’d love to hear from you. You can find recent Staple Days here.

Short Version: Spring and Fowl, Elemental, Deal, Pressing Issues, Commonplace, Bird from Malta, You and I.

In With the New

The new year’s calendar is coming together. We have the Spring Limited Edition heading to press shortly. It’s a beautiful package with a surprising and familiar theme. Aside from restocking just about everything after a crazy end of the year (thanks for that) we have two other products on press currently.

You won’t be surprised to hear we’re sponsoring The Tournament of Books again this year. For the first time, one of my recommendations to the ToB made it onto the short list, so I’ll be pulling for the The Director by Daniel Kehlmann. This year’s ToB Memo Book design is fun and sales will raise funds for the American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans program.

The other product in the works combines a really old, really sweet story, a linocut from a favorite Chicago artist, and a ton of scholarly research from Bryan. You’ll see that in a couple weeks.

Periodically, We Get Mail

“Color war is an annual tradition at my high school. My class had the potential to be the first ever to win three color wars across their tenure, so pressure was high.”

“Everyone began strategizing, figuring out which events they would best serve our team in. I typically participate in ‘the big moment,’ a head-to-head competition where students from each grade are given a mystery challenge to study for and then complete on stage, in front of the entire school. I didn't know what to expect, and was concerned when I was handed my task: recite the entire periodic table of elements, in order! My competitors turned to ChatGPT, or an earworm-y song. But I knew what I had to do: go analog.”

“This single Field Notes page was crammed with my various memorization tactics. The most effective is boxed in blue, where I clumped elements into groups of 2-5 in a row. On stage, I got over twice as far as my competitors, passing 60 consecutive elements before skipping two due to crowd pressure.”

“We won color war by 950 points, a 25% margin. And it was an incredibly collaborative effort. But my piece of the victory is partially yours, and I thought it was worth sharing.”

Congratulations to Pierce M. and the Class of 2026. As you might expect, we’re sending Pierce a “Group Eleven” Edition 3-Pack.

Ink, Paper, and Muscle

Here are the three finished posters we made with Nashville’s legendary letterpress shop, Hatch Show Print. After they printed them we cut them up to make the covers for our Fall 2022 Memo Books. Aside from a small number of packs on the Rarities Shelf at HQ, the “Hatch Show Print” Edition is now sold out.

Related: We sent Aaron Draplin to Hatch to document the process in our film, Rubbing Elbows with Ghosts.

Singular Perspectives

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.

We are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.

Note: It’s a lovely thing when one of your children discovers one of your favorite stories on her own, and then tells you about it. My daughter recently sent me a note to check out Kurt Vonnegut’s tale of heading out to buy a single envelope. Watch KV tell it himself in a 2004 lecture at Case Western University, the story starts around 24 minutes in. Also, the story originally appears in A Man Without a Country.

In unease the earth turned itself inside
out when its gravity fled. All of us
fell off the earth.

Note: Jim Harrison died on March 26, 2016. He was found at his writing desk with a notebook opened to this page, a draft of an untitled poem. For twenty years Joseph Bednarik served as Harrison’s poetry editor. He also made a pilgrimage to view the Harrison archives.

Blank First Page

We’re always happy to see a new episode of Lukas Grech’s video series about Field Notes and other stationery issues. He recently focused on our “1943” Edition which includes 2-Way Memo Books and the Field Notes Brand Books reprint of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

Note: Lukas was born and raised in Malta, so he probably knows the real story behind the Falcon and The Grand Master of the Order of St John.

Always in Love

Remember when we paired each member of Wilco with an exceptional artist, handed them all the same limited palette of colors, and let them improvise? Yeah, that was cool. Steve’s film rocks too.

And like pretty much everything Field Notes related, it came to you via Chicago. Talk to you soon.

^*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.