Staple Day 37

A MONTHLY UPDATE FROM INSIDE FIELD NOTES

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Hi, it’s Jim from Field Notes. This is our 37th 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: PWH, 401 North Racine, Stamping, HOMES, Keep At It, Phone Less, Use Cases.

“what!? WHAT!?”

Our Pee-wee Herman collab sold out fast, if you haven’t received yours yet, have no fear, we’re busy catching up on them and the Fall Edition orders from last week too. The Word of the Day is “Patience.” BTW: If you missed ordering on our site, there are still some available at the Pee-wee’s Playhouse site.

A Very Open House

We hosted a happy hour at HQ last week for the debut of the “Hunter’s Moon” Edition, our Fall release. Laura Weiler, who created the artwork for the covers was here. Watch our short documentary on her unique process. The prize for the person who traveled the farthest to attend went to a woman from Argentina. She received a signed and numbered print of Laura’s original artwork. Thanks to everyone who stopped by, especially because, due to some last minute scheduling problems, folks only had a couple days notice about the event.

If you’re in the area or can get here quick, we’ll be participating in Open House Chicago this weekend. It’s always a blast to meet curious people at HQ and show them around our space and shop. The only downside is that, since we’re hosting, we don’t get to visit all the other cool Chicago places that are open to the public.

Next month we’ll be hosting a launch party for our winter release, and will let you know the details on that pretty soon. The edition is something people frequently request, and includes quite possibly the most-complicated and ridiculous bonus for year-long subscribers that we’ve ever made.

Our annual Holiday Market is scheduled for December 12. HQ is open for shopping Thursdays and Fridays right now and we’ll expand the days as we get closer to the holidays.

Greetings from the Shore

“Like many Field Notes releases, ‘The Great Lakes’ Edition required extensive research, both for the text and the visuals. While searching for vintage Great Lakes ephemera on eBay, Jim came across a few similar colorful postcards printed on linen cardstock. A bit of Googling revealed these ‘Art-Colortone’ cards, produced by Curt Teich and Co., were a goldmine of American history, told with ink and paper… just the sort of thing we get excited about.”

“By this point, ‘The Great Lakes’ edition itself was well underway, and there was no obvious way to incorporate the Teich aesthetic into the Memo Book design. But these postcards were impossible to ignore, especially once we dug into Jeffrey L. Meikle’s wonderful Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation 1931-1950. When we learned that Teich was based here in Chicago, and that the Newberry Library, also just a couple miles from our office, hosted the full collection of every postcard Teich ever produced AND the company’s complete records and production files, there was absolutely no way we could walk away from them.”

Read the whole story in this Dispatch from Bryan.

As Is Written

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 entries.

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog... you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Note: A quote by E.L. Doctorow from Episode 2 of the second season of John Dickerson’s Navel Gazing podcast. John examines and expounds on selections from the notebooks he has been filling up for most of his life. We’re happy to say that many of those books were shipped to him from HQ in Chicago. Plus, he practically made us add a Reporter’s Notebook to our product line in 2016. Here’s a chat we had with back then.

“Shakespeare must have known more about writing than anybody else ever did. Every year I said to myself, ‘You better teach this bastard so you don’t forget what great writing is like.’ I taught him technically, two whole weeks for the first scene from Hamlet. I’d spend the first day on just the first line, ‘Who’s there?’”

Note: From Pete Dexter’s interview with the late, great Norman Maclean. Field Notes co-conspirator and author Kevin Guilfoile is currently reading Maclean’s Young Men and Fire for the very first time (lucky bastard) and filling my inbox with quotes. So, of course, I’m reading it again.

Poking at Slabs of Glass

Elissa Sanci has been trying to make her phone less useful. “instead of chucking my phone, I made it less important. I started looking for analog alternatives to some of the more frivolous apps on my phone — things that didn’t need to live inside a glowing rectangle in the first place. It might seem silly to spend money on stuff I already have access to, but being even just a little less dependent on my phone has made a huge difference in my attention span, my productivity, and, most importantly, my mental health.” Judging by people who write to Field Notes, and frequently on paper, Elissa is not alone.

What’s the Use?

For last month’s contest, I asked folks to submit Practical Applications, the suggested uses for our notebooks that are listed on the inside back cover of almost every Field Notes product. Entries are closed and we’re still combing through practically a thousand of them. We will announce the thirty winners next month.

Thanks, as always, for paying attention.

^*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.