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The anniversary date of “Field Notes” varies a bit, depending on who you ask. Aaron Draplin first used the name (typeset, of course, in all-caps Futura Bold) on a customized one-off red hardcover notebook in 2002. Our “official line” sets the birth of the company in mid-2007, when Coudal Partners and Aaron first printed a batch of 3-Packs for the “Swap Meat,” followed shortly by the establishment of “Field Notes Brand” as an actual thing.
But a good case can be made that the very first Field Notes were made in “early January 2005,” making this, January 2025, an important 20th anniversary. This was the first “big” run (200 books, big for the time!), hand-printed by Aaron on his desktop Gocco silkscreen rig.* This was the first use of a kraft-paper cover. The general look-and-feel, while a bit narrower, is mostly dialed-in. The body is graph paper, even if it’s trimmed-down letter-size dungeon-mapping blue-ruled graph paper.
The photo above appears to be the outside and inside covers printed on chipboard (surely a proof, the margins are all wrong) but the art matches that first run (pictured at right,) printed on French Paper Speckletone Kraft (despite “Construction” being listed in the specs.) Aaron’ll tell you it was paper left over from some other project, so it’s possible different papers were used. I could call him and ask him, but I’m having fun speculating.
Back in 2017 we offered a Tenth Anniversary Edition, a 3-Pack with (approximate) replicas of three early Field Notes: that first red hardcover book, this one, and the first we printed together. There are a few other “missing links” along the way, and we’ve got a year and a half to come up with a way to celebrate our “official” 20th.
But we thought you’d like to join us to take a moment to imagine a young Aaron Draplin, twenty years ago. Not a hint of gray in the beard. Only a couple years into living in Portland. Makin’ a name for himself. Blasting his already-worn-out Yoshimi CD on the bookshelf stereo. Gocco-ing up a storm.
*Aaron may or may not be excited to learn that Riso has recently launched the “Goccopro,” a high-tech (and presumably far more expensive) “digital screen making system.” It lacks the simple charm of the long-unavailable original, but it just may revolutionize screenmaking.