Staple Day 29

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

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Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our 29th 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.

Counting Crows

Thanks to everyone who has ordered a copy of this year’s Rooster Book. We’ve been the title sponsor for The Tournament of Books since 2010 and have produced a custom Memo Book for each year’s tourney. Over the years we have raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity and this year we’re once again donating to the American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans program.

The ToB kicks off in March. Whether you have read all, some, or none of the entrants (I usually get to five or six) it’s fun to follow along. The individual match judgments are always smart, surprising and elicit thoughtful responses in the comments.

Stuffed

Speaking of 2010, for our 6th Quarterly Limited Edition, “Packet of Sunshine,” we went beyond simply choosing new colors and paper and created a custom top-loading, string-tied envelope, which was inspired by vintage American seed packaging. Inside was a bright yellow 3-Pack of Memo Books and a small zip-sealed plastic bag containing American Marigold seeds of the “Crackerjack” variety, plus growing instructions.

At the time it was a big print run for us, but we figured it would be relatively quick and easy to assemble the 4,000 packs. As we sat down to get started at our conference room table we discovered it was neither. But the edition was a hit and it wasn’t too long before we started receiving photos of young marigold plants blooming in window boxes and in gardens. Our next Quarterly was “County Fair” and with that one we started making films and left the product packaging to professionals.

Birds, Trees, Words, Pictures

“Behind every creative work is a ruling force, usually ambition to leave our little mark on the sands of Fame. With me this impulse was shame—a feeling of chagrin that Americans had no complete pictorial colored record of their birds and trees.” — Rex Brasher

When Rex was eight years old he wrote in his diary that he wanted to paint every bird in North America. He did that, and by 1933 he had completed 100 sets of The Birds and Trees of North America which included 87,400 hand-colored plates.

The Rex Brasher Association has recently reached a milestone of their own. “All twelve volumes have now been fully transcribed, photographed, and prepared for digital access. While individual volumes are still being released, the record itself is complete.” We are proud to have played a small role in telling this story through our “Birds and Trees of North America” 3-Packs, our short documentary film about Rex, A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day, and by providing financial support to the association.

Remember it Now

“Across 24 studies, college students who took handwritten notes were 58 percent more likely to get A’s in their courses than those who typed notes on laptops.” The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education, by Jean M. Twenge for the NYT.

Set List

Over the years we have been fortunate to have collaborated with some of our favorite bands and artists to produce custom packs to be sold to fans and displayed on tour merch stands. It occurs to me that if we somehow got them all together it would make for a great day at a music festival: Wilco, Maggie Rogers, Jason Isbel, Bon Iver, and with the release of her new record, “Creature of Habit,” we can add Courtney Barnett to the line-up.

Related: We happened to notice that Pixies, Flaming Lips, and Brandi Carlile are all touring this summer. We’ve got a couple slots open in our imaginary festival. Just putting that out there.

Craft Work

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.

A chair, a bed, a pair of boots. His act of painting them was far nearer than that of any other painter to the carpenter’s or the shoemaker’s act of making them.

Note: John Berger’s short essay on Vincent Van Gogh can be found in Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, his final book. I’ve just read and enjoyed Joshua Sperling’s biography of Berger, A Writer of Our Time. If you’d like to dive deeper (and you should) start with Portraits.

Very small and damaged and quite dry,
a Roman water nymph made of bone
tries to summon a river out of limestone

Note: The first stanza of Alice Oswald’s “Dunt: a poem for a dried up river.” In an interview in the current Paris Review, Oswald talks about finding the structure of poem. “There is still only one way a free poem can be, it’s just that you’ve got to keep tinging it until the tinging comes out right.”

A Change of the Seasons

Our Spring Edition tells the fortunate story of an American icon that is also a bit sad. The Memo Books are on press now and we’re in pre-production for the film that will accompany it and we can’t wait to share them with you. Consider joining the thousands of people who have signed up for a year-long subscription to our limited editions so you’ll be the first to get it, along with all the other benefits of being a subscriber.

Thanks for reading. I’m working on a fun contest for next month, cya then.

^*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.