Staple Day 31

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

Sign up for The List to receive Staple Day* mailings first, including occasional one-day-only offers, right to your inbox every month.

Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our 31st 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: Next Three, Deal, Two Staples, Lab Books, Mapping, Definitions, Note Taking, Contest Winners.

Three Quarters

We’re in preproduction for both our Summer Limited Edition and the film that will accompany it. Bryan and Casey have been spending a lot of time in the photo studio and in the kitchen at HQ and we’re recruiting some expert help as well as searching for a film location as well as a very specific prop.

We’ll review concepts and sketches for the Fall release next month and we have scheduled travel and a shoot for late June.

And we have settled on a really fun idea for Winter, and while that seems like a long way off, it is an ambitious undertaking and parts of it will take a fair amount of time to complete. You’ll understand when you see it, and wish you were a subscriber when it’s announced.

This Side Up

Our Two-Way Memo Books, with the staples on the short side, are a surprise hit. Folks say they like their flexibility, with most using them primarily in the vertical orientation, sort of like a mini Reporter’s Note Book. The other part of our Winter release is Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, published in the format of the Armed Service Editions from the Second World War. People dig these odd, horizontal pocket-books, but what they are really loving is the novel itself. Our friend and co-conspirator Molly Manning asks, “Which is from 1943?”

If you’d like to read The Maltese Falcon in your book club, or in a class, you can save 50% when ordering four or more copies. Use the coupon code FALCONS when checking out.

Refuted by Fire

“In the space between the hands-on, physical reality of experimental science and the structured narratives fit for printed journals, sits a special genre of scientific writing: lab notebooks. They are the closest witness to science in the making.”

From Ulkar Aghayeva’s “A Brief History of Lab Notebooks” for Asimov Press. This illustrated essay starts in the Renaissance and examines how the real-time recording of experiments, and the note books that have been used to record them, have changed over time.

Riding Shotgun

Alongside our 2019 Spring release, the “Mile Marker” Edition, a 3-Pack of Memo Books celebrating America’s Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways, we offered an additional item, an old-school, gas-station-style, difficult-to-refold-properly, Field Notes National Highway Map. Subscribers received one free, natch.

One side of the map featured a large, colorful diagram of the continental Interstate System, designed exclusively for Field Notes by Cameron Booth of Portland, Oregon (2,117 driving miles from HQ in Chicago), who implemented a beautiful and thoughtful data design scheme for this project.

The reverse side featured 28 panels completely jammed with useful, sorta useful, and some fun-but-not-at-all-useful information. The Map includes a history of the Interstate System, an essential Citizens’ Band radio glossary, mile marker and exit numbering conventions, national traffic control sign design guidelines, a classic “License Plate Game” scorecard, and tons of other helpful and/or arcane information guaranteed to entertain, educate, and/or confuse you on your next big road trip.

We had fun making the film for this edition too, and luckily no one asked if we had a permit to shoot it on public highway.

V is for Villainy

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.

He and Dutch would get together and cut up touches.

Note: I’ve been re-reading Up In the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell’s collected columns from The New Yorker. I started with “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon” and was struck by this line. I’d never heard that turn of phrase before so I hunted around and found “touches” referencing pickpockets and swindlers, as in “he was an easy touch.” But, of course, the best definition is found in the indispensable Green’s Dictionary of Slang: “to reminisce over old successes, villainies etc.”

Watch any animal: before long it will let you know something about mankind. It works the other way, too: watch any human being long enough and he will let you know something about which animal he might have been, given half a chance.

Note: From the introduction of An Alphabestiary by poet John Ciardi, illustrated by the sculptor Milton Hebald. Gifted to me when I was very young, I believe this was the first non-children’s book I ever owned, and sadly somehow lost. I bought a vintage copy while doing some research for a future project. You can read this beautiful book at Archive.org and here’s a sample spread from my copy, “F is for Fox.”

Duly Noted

“Everyone assumes AI meeting tools replace note-taking. It captures who said what, generates summaries, tags topics automatically. My meetings are fully indexed and searchable.”

“And I take more handwritten notes than before I had any of this.”

This post by Lucas Radke fits nicely with the series of educational studies about taking notes by hand and comprehension that we’ve discussed previously. (See “Science FTW” in SD 10.)

Cover Shots

In last month’s Staple Day we asked folks to send us a photo of a book they were reading and a Field Notes they were using, or any interesting combination of the two items. We got a ton of great responses, and it was difficult to choose just ten. Here are the winners who each received a 3-Pack of the long sold-out “Ambition” Edition from the Winter of 2014.

Thanks for reading these newsletters and writing back too. It’s nice to be able to cut up touches on a regular basis.

^*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.