Staple Day 33

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

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Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our 33rd 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: Underland Rivers, A Contest, FNBB, Explore, Incoming, Commonplace, Da City of Da Pope.

Friends in Low Places

We first met Robert Macfarlane after the publication of his book Underland. In an interview, Robert recounted how he used more than twenty notebooks for his research. “Each records a different landscape and descent: down to the starless rivers that run far below the limestone of north-west Italy, into the catacombs of Paris, down into the blue interiors of Greenlandic glaciers, or the sandstone rock-shelters of Bohemia, or a Dark Matter research laboratory in North Yorkshire, or a remote cave-art site on a wild Arctic coast, among other places.”

Accompanying his description was a photograph. We were pleasantly surprised that many of his beautifully beaten-up books were Field Notes. I wrote Robert proposing an international trade agreement. We would send him a big box of Field Notes in exchange for a signed first editon, and he graciously accepted. Fast forward to the publication of the paperback of Underland when it seemed natural to produce a collaboration featuring artist Stanley Donwood’s glorious painting “Nether,” which illustrated the book’s cover.

Note: Underland has now been adapted into a beautiful film directed by Robert Petit. It’s screening in select theaters and is available on major streaming platforms.

Last year we put the band back together, so to speak, with the “Is a River Alive” Edition, again featuring Donwood’s work, this time a hand-carved linocut titled “Meander” which was used to produce cover art for the UK and USA Editions. We also sat down with Robert at Mayhem Gulch along the Clear Creek in the Colorado Rockies to chat about the project.

Down By the River, a Contest

Take a photo of any Field Notes Note Book near a river, stream, or creek and tell us about the location. We’ll publish a dozen of them in next month’s Staple Day and send those folks an “Is a River Alive?” 3-Pack and some swag. Deadline for entry is July 26th. Please send or link to your photo in an email to [email protected].

A Little Library

Speaking of books, our publishing imprint, Field Note Brand Books, has moved along, albeit slowly. We started with A Drive Into the Gap by Kevin Guifoile, a true story about fathers and sons, baseball and memory, and the improbable journey of a bat from one of the most iconic moments in the history of the Major League Baseball to the bedroom of a 12-year-old boy. So you know, we have a couple hundred copies of that still available. It’s just about the perfect baseball-dad gift. Here is Kottke’s post on Gap.

More recently we ventured into the past to reissue Dashiell Hammett’s magnificent hard-boiled detective novel, The Maltese Falcon, in the format of the Armed Services Edition paperbacks from the Second World War. We’ve gone even further back in time for an essential book project which is on press right now. Watch for details about that next week. Plus, we’re playing around with a book idea to accompany this year’s Winter Limited Edition if we can find the right collaborator. We’ll see.

Get Up and Go

America’s vast recreational and tourism network goes well beyond the lands featured in our “National Parks” Series. It also encompasses expansive monuments, dense forests, breathtaking coastlines, and scenic trail networks. We are excited to expand our offering of memo books celebrating these great American vistas with the first two 3-Packs of our new “Explore America” Series: Northern California and the Triple Crown of Hiking. Made in collaboration with our friends at 59 Parks, these feature the work of artists Shepard Fairey, Glenn Thomas, Chris Turnham, and Benjamin Flouw.

In our mail announcing this new series we wrote that we intend to expand the “Explore America” line over time and asked for your suggestions. Oh boy, did you have suggestions. Thanks, keep them coming.

We Get Mail

Timothy from Ypsilanti sent us a rare glimpse into Staple Days of past generations. Holly of Local 683 writes, “Bent pages, conduit math, wire notes, sketches, job site reminders — all of it tells the story of my apprenticeship to be an electrician. I am going into my 2nd year out of 4 and this notebook helps me so much. I like to reflect and see my progress. It’s messy, worn out but it’s a wonderful reminder that I have learned a lot.”

There But Not There

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 problem of making artists talk about their work is that when they’re making their work the left-brain is shut off. So if you talk to an artist about it, you’re talking to someone who wasn’t there. It’s hopeless.

Note: Peter Schjeldahl was the long-time art critic for The New Yorker and he was always keenly observant and fun to read. Here’s editor David Remnick’s rememberance of the critic’s career with the magazine.

Will Halloway, Jim Nightshade, Charles Halloway, G.M. Dark, J.C. Cooger, The Dust Witch, Miss Foley, The Skeleton, Tom Fury.

Note: The cast of characters from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, who we listed on the inside back cover of our first run of Pitch Black Memo books in 2018. I think of Ray’s books as a gift from my father and even though Pop is no longer around, revisiting them makes me feel close to him. And honestly, about 14 years old.

Summer in the City

We’ll be hosting a Happy Hour Launch Party at HQ when the Summer Edition is announced. We’ll email the details ahead of time. Maybe plan a few days to hang out in Chicago? We’d love to see you.

Thanks for reading and writing back too. BTW, a Field Notes Chicago Flag 3-Pack was in the bag o’ swag Mayor Brandon Johnson presented to Pope Leo while visiting The Vatican last month.

So we got that going for us. Which is nice.

^*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.