Staple Day 32

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

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Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our 32nd 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: Rex & Matthew, Quentin & Owen, Joan & Julian, Rare & Familiar, Sam & Ivan, Spade & Archer.

A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day

For me, the perfect Quarterly Edition is one that takes us on a journey that requires us to research, experiment, and investigate the story behind something that we don’t know anything about. I’ve said many times that our two most important assets are curiosity and a short attention span. The pace of our seasonal releases feeds both those instincts.

Ideally the topic is related to the history of American publishing, printing, art, writing, or design. A more indefinable requirement is that it has to feel Field Notes-y, which admittedly is a “we’ll know it when we see it” sort of test. If we get excited about the journey of discovery, we just take it on faith that folks like us will dig the end product and the story behind it.

Day Game, Two Rivers, The United States of Letterpress, Harvest, and 1943 are particulary good examples of story-driven releases.

And, of course, this one.

On May 20th, 2024 a note came into our general mailbox from Matthew Schnepf, a board member of a small non-profit in Kent, Connecticut. Through images and links it outlined the amazing tale of an artist, who at eight-years-old, wrote is his diary that he was going to draw, from nature, every bird in North America. By the time he died in 1960 Rex Brasher had done just that. In one rare press mention, The Washington Post called Brasher “the greatest bird artist you’ve never heard of.”

Matthew concluded his mail this way. “I didn’t think of a Rex Brasher and Field Notes collaboration until this morning, but now I can’t unthink it.” From that moment, I couldn’t either.

We quickly scheduled a visit to Connecticut to film a short documentary and got right to work on “The Birds and Trees of North America Edition,” which would go on to become one of our most popular products ever. Most importantly, it generated a lot of interest in Rex Brasher’s work as well as significant and ongoing financial support for the foundation, which is seeking to build a museum in Kent to house and make Rex’s incomparable original artwork accessible to the public.

Early Onset Birdwatching

It’s prime season for birding. Millions of birds are currently making their way north for the summer and it’s a great time to check off rare species on your life-list. Sunday I spotted some at our feeder that weren’t even listed in my bird book. Any ideas?

Also: If you haven’t see it yet, check out Listers, a film about obsessive birders by Quentin and Owen Reiser. Daniel Milnor’s review gets it right.

Open Lines

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

This is the third or maybe fourth time I’ve quoted the patron saint of journaling, Joan Didion in a Staple Day. It won’t be the last. This quote is from Slouching Towards Bethlehem and posting it also gives me the opportunity to link my favorite photo of her, by the late, great Julian Wasser.

Testing, 1, 2, 3...

We’re playing around with a new feature for subscribers. It’s something we’ve been wanting to try for a while. Think of it as having occasional access to an online version of the Rarities Shelf that we have in The Shop at HQ.

An hour ago we ran a test to try this out and opened the last full box of 2014’s long sold-out “Ambition” Edition (the one with the gilded-in-gold page edges). We offered 70 market-priced 3-Packs to active subscribers on a page on the site we’re calling The Vault. They sold out in a flash.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go

Our “National Parks” Series debuted in the Summer of 2019 and has been expanding ever since. I don’t want to say too much about it quite yet, but we’ve just finished printing the first packs from a new Parks-adjacent series that will be available in the next few weeks. Staple Day readers are hearing about it here first.

Previously Now

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.

The past recaptured was often more poignant than the past actually lived.

Note: I just finished Ron Chernow’s massive biography of Mark Twain and learned much that I didn’t know about Twain’s life and work. It was fascinating to see how he relied on memories of his youth, real, embellished, or imagined for Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

Ivan Albright’s last print – drawn on a plate while in the last day or so of his life.

Note: In 1981 Ivan Albright began a series of self-portraits for the Uffizi in Florence. For the next two years, ending with his death in 1983, the artist created 24 small self-portraits in various media. The series is in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago but not currently on display. At one time they were all hung, in chronological order, on one long wall and I remember having to find a place to sit down after seeing them. Overwhelming. This is the first, and this, the last.

One Final Bird Thing

Re-upping this from last month since a bunch of folks took advantage of the deal. 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 of our Field Notes Brand Books reissue. Use the coupon code FALCONS when checking out.

Thanks for reading and writing back too. The Summer Edition is on deck. It’s a sweet concept, and perfect for the season. We have a couple collabs in the works too, including one, that if you guessed all week long, you’d never even get close. 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.