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 34th 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: Delish, Jep, Purloined, Inspo, Subs, One Job, Incidents, Accident, Flows, F Dox.

The Sweet Life

Thanks to everyone who visited HQ last week for our Summer Launch Party, especially to our friends from Paletaría Los Magos, who brought frozen treats and elotes for all. Learn more about them in the short documentary for our latest limited edition, The “Paletas” Edition.

The bright, textured “flavors” in the new release new have been a big hit, and the numbered and embossed press proofs are selling quickly too. Not since 2013’s “Drink Local” Edition has the production of a quarterly release involved so much ice-cold deliciousness. And it couldn’t have come at a better time, considering the weather in Chicago lately.

I’ll Take Field Notes for $400 Ken

If you’re ever curious to know which of your relatives watch new Jeopardy! episodes as they debut on weekday afternoons, just have your brand name show up as the title of a category and watch your inbox and messages. (Thanks fam!) Alas, the only clue that was even remotely related to us was the answer to this local clue, “Play ball! It was built in 1914 on the site of a former seminary on Chicago’s North Side.”

Related: Matt Wheeler writes, “You may be interested to know that Field Notes played a role in my preparation for being on, and winning on, America’s Favorite Quiz Show.”

“In the third stage of auditioning for Jeopardy!, we were asked to bring a stand-in signaling device. For me, the choice was easy. I regularly carry one of my many black Field Notes Clic Pens. So, not only in that audition, but also in many practice rounds of the game at home, Field Notes was with me, helping me hone my buzzer timing.”

“It worked, too. If you check Season 42, episodes 199 and 200, you can see how I did. It turns out that the classic Clic Pen is useful beyond being a reliable everyday writing implement!”

Pilferage

Michael B. Dougherty’s request, “If I ask you to put a pen in your pocket just take it and act cool.”

Future Forward

A quick reminder that year-long subscribers are receiving all three 3-packs of The “Paletas” Edition. Our Fall Limited Edition is heading to press shortly and we shot the film for it in Michigan a couple weeks ago. We have two concepts for Winter and Spring but we’re not quite sure which one is which.

Then there will be Summer.
Our 75th Limited Edition.
And Subscriber Bonus.
Oh Man.

Subscribers are the very heart of Field Notes. Your faith inspires us to be ambitious and take chances with what we make next. Just wait, you’ll see. Start a new subscription or renew a current one.

Things Got a Little Out of Hand

“And each of them, I’ll associate with memories of the month I spent using them. It’s a neat and for me unexpected combination of being pretty enough to enjoy using them, but not so precious that I don’t want to sully them. The size becomes a feature, too — instead of being A Big Book of Everything, the limited life span of a memo book means it’ll forever be associated with a very specific time.”

Chuck Jordan on moving to analog note taking and, lucky for us, adopting Field Notes as his primary tool. I love the idea of a particular design serving as a memory token to a particular time. Similarly I’ve occasionally used a single Memo Book for a specific travel destination, writing the place and dates on the cover and chucking it into a box when returning home. One book, one trip. It seems like the ideal job for a single-use Memo Book. I went back to one of those for today’s first Commonplace entry.

Accidental

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.

7/26: Henry James around the corner from Seamus at NPG.

Note: From a 2024 trip to London. Noting two portraits, like their subjects, completely different in manner and style and each, just exactly perfect. Henry James by John Singer Sargent and Seamus Heaney by Tai-Shan Schierenberg.

But the polished ring of Polish flint...
Is the stone hurt? You asked, kissing
My elbow. Oh no, it is of a marvelous
Hardness. It is used to tipping arrows,
It can take the falling, falling.
The weight of two people
And a bicycle built for two.

Note: From a lovely new poem by Patricia Lockwood in Poetry Magazine. I’ve read it multiple times since it appeared and it really sings when read out loud. Her new collection, Agate Head/Stone Soup, will be published by Penguin this fall. Also, see her whip-smart, and very funny diary entry in the latest London Review of Books.

Rivers Run Through It

Last month we asked folks to take a photo of a Field Notes Note Book near a river, stream, or creek and tell us about the location. We got a flood of entries and we’ve just published the twelve winners on our site this morning and will send them each an “Is a River Alive?” 3-Pack. Watch for a new contest next month.

In Witness Whereof

If you’re a High School Civics Teacher, Scout Troop Leader, Chief Justice, or the Exalted Ruler of an Elks Club Lodge and you’d like to provide your group with copies of The Founding Documents, our pocket reference of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, you can save 25% on packs of ten from Field Notes Brand Books. Need a lot more? Drop us a line and we can, um, amend the price.

Thanks for reading and all the feedback too.

---

^*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.

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 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 pages@fieldnotesbrand.live.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 30th 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: Stationery, Spring, Deal, Looking Ahead, I Do, Pixel Portaits, Recognition, Rooster, Contest.

In Like a Lion

This Saturday and Sunday we’ll be at the 2nd Annual Chicago Stationery Festival and we made a special collectible set for attendees. If you’re in the city for the fest, why not come and see us at HQ tomorrow or Friday (3/12 & 13) from 9-5? We’ll break out some fun stuff from The Archives, you’ll get a special Guest Pass Memo Book with any purchase and, of course, we’ll offer our full line of products, plus plenty of nerdy printing and design conversations.

Almost Sprung

We shot the film to accompany our Spring Limited Edition on location the day before yesterday and absolutely lucked out with a sunny, 70 degree early March day. Barring something unforseen, we’ll drop this Edition a week from today (3/18) and host a Launch Party Happy Hour at HQ in Chicago the following evening. We’d love to see you.

The Road Goes Ever On

Due to an unusual burst of pre-planning we have both our Summer and Fall Editions already in the works. The Summer release will be sweet, and unlike any Quarterly Edition that has come before it. The Fall concept came out of a chance encounter with an artist who works with unusual materials, a rich imagination, and also has a Chicago connection. For what it’s worth, we talked about a lot things in our initial meeting, including this poem. Winter is anybody’s guess at this point.

Consider joining the thousands of people who have signed up for a year-long subscription to our Quarterly Limited Editions. You’ll be in time for our Spring release and along with lots of other benefits, your first shipment will come in our 2026 Subscriber Box, created by the one and only Jen Farrell of Starshaped Press.

Ring Boxing

I’ve mentioned before that we get invited to dozens of weddings each year. Couples use our note books to record their vows, as gifts for the bridal party, and even to indicate seating assignments. And they frequently send us an invite to the ceremony. We have a big bulletin board filled with these at HQ. We have not RSVP’d to a bride and groom yet but nothing makes us happier than to be included in their thoughts and plans. Here’s a note we recently received from Cameron.

“I’ve been carrying around one of your notebooks in my pocket for the last six years. It’s mostly filled with reminders, to-do lists, and miscellaneous notes. In August of 2024, I decided to propose to my girlfriend on a hike in Door County, Wisconsin.”

“I was sitting at my desk contemplating how I was going to fit the ring box in my pocket without her noticing it on our hike until it dawned on me. After modifying a new note book with a Sharpie, a center hole punch and a twist tie: I had a new ring box that was not only discrete, but felt special to me. We’re getting married in August.

Note: Congratulations to Taylor and Cameron. Julia and Carson, thanks for inviting us. And to Oliver and Alyssa, we trust everything went great, under a new moon, at Death Valley National Park.

Warning: Graphic Content

Back in the early years of Field Notes I started making little pixel-art versions of each of our limited editions. I’d add them quarterly to a file that served as a fun, visual reference. I’m not sure why I stopped but the last one I made was for The “Shenandoah” Edition in 2015. Anyhow, I stumbled on the file a little while ago and posted it to the HQ Slack and Casey got it up to date. You can download it here.

The Heart of the Matter

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.

As if all there were, were fireflies
And from them you could infer the meadow

Note: From “Dark Matter” by astrophysicist Rebecca Elson. Her collected poems can be found in A Responsibilty to Awe. I’m grateful to have been introduced to her work via Robert Macfarlane’s book Underland which has just been adapted into a new film. We’ve collaborated with Robert and artist Stanley Donwood on both the “Underland” and “Is a River Alive?” Editions.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. “There it is.”

Note: From a 1985 interview with Robert Stone. I recently revisited his A Flag for Sunrise, which I read first in college. It holds up, and in some ways seems more true to the world today than it was in 1980s. Also, his memoir of the 1960’s, Prime Green, is great.

Once More, Into the Brackets

Our special “Rooster” Book, that we make every year as part of our Sponsorship of the Tournamant of Books, sold out very quickly. Thanks for that. The first round of the 22nd ToB is in full swing right now. Jump in.

Read, Write, and Shoot

This month’s contest is inspired by the list on the inside back cover of our Field Notes Brand Books reissue of The Maltese Falcon. To enter, just send a mail to pages@fieldnotesbrand.live containing a photo of a book you are reading and a Field Notes you are using, or any interesting combination of the two items.

For example: “Mile Marker” and On the Road by Jack Kerouac, “Great Lakes” and The Gales of November by John Bacon, or “Three Missions” and The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. We’ll pick ten winners and send them each a long-sold-out Quarterly Edition from the Archives. Enter by Friday March 27th, 2026.

Thanks for reading. Hope to see you this weekend, or at our Spring Launch Party, or in a future Staple Day.

---

^*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.

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 29th 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: Spring and Fowl, Elemental, Deal, Pressing Issues, Commonplace, Bird from Malta, You and I.

Counting Crows

Thanks to everyone who has ordered a copy of this year’s Rooster Book. We’ve been the title sponsor for The Tournament of Books since 2010 and have produced a custom Memo Book for each year’s tourney. Over the years we have raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity and this year we’re once again donating to the American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans program.

The ToB kicks off in March. Whether you have read all, some, or none of the entrants (I usually get to five or six) it’s fun to follow along. The individual match judgments are always smart, surprising and elicit thoughtful responses in the comments.

Stuffed

Speaking of 2010, for our 6th Quarterly Limited Edition, “Packet of Sunshine,” we went beyond simply choosing new colors and paper and created a custom top-loading, string-tied envelope, which was inspired by vintage American seed packaging. Inside was a bright yellow 3-Pack of Memo Books and a small zip-sealed plastic bag containing American Marigold seeds of the “Crackerjack” variety, plus growing instructions.

At the time it was a big print run for us, but we figured it would be relatively quick and easy to assemble the 4,000 packs. As we sat down to get started at our conference room table we discovered it was neither. But the edition was a hit and it wasn’t too long before we started receiving photos of young marigold plants blooming in window boxes and in gardens. Our next Quarterly was “County Fair” and with that one we started making films and left the product packaging to professionals.

Birds, Trees, Words, Pictures

“Behind every creative work is a ruling force, usually ambition to leave our little mark on the sands of Fame. With me this impulse was shame—a feeling of chagrin that Americans had no complete pictorial colored record of their birds and trees.” — Rex Brasher

When Rex was eight years old he wrote in his diary that he wanted to paint every bird in North America. He did that, and by 1933 he had completed 100 sets of The Birds and Trees of North America which included 87,400 hand-colored plates.

The Rex Brasher Association has recently reached a milestone of their own. “All twelve volumes have now been fully transcribed, photographed, and prepared for digital access. While individual volumes are still being released, the record itself is complete.” We are proud to have played a small role in telling this story through our “Birds and Trees of North America” 3-Packs, our short documentary film about Rex, A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day, and by providing financial support to the association.

Remember it Now

“Across 24 studies, college students who took handwritten notes were 58 percent more likely to get A’s in their courses than those who typed notes on laptops.” The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education, by Jean M. Twenge for the NYT.

Set List

Over the years we have been fortunate to have collaborated with some of our favorite bands and artists to produce custom packs to be sold to fans and displayed on tour merch stands. It occurs to me that if we somehow got them all together it would make for a great day at a music festival: Wilco, Maggie Rogers, Jason Isbel, Bon Iver, and with the release of her new record, “Creature of Habit,” we can add Courtney Barnett to the line-up.

Related: We happened to notice that Pixies, Flaming Lips, and Brandi Carlile are all touring this summer. We’ve got a couple slots open in our imaginary festival. Just putting that out there.

Craft Work

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.

A chair, a bed, a pair of boots. His act of painting them was far nearer than that of any other painter to the carpenter’s or the shoemaker’s act of making them.

Note: John Berger’s short essay on Vincent Van Gogh can be found in Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, his final book. I’ve just read and enjoyed Joshua Sperling’s biography of Berger, A Writer of Our Time. If you’d like to dive deeper (and you should) start with Portraits.

Very small and damaged and quite dry,
a Roman water nymph made of bone
tries to summon a river out of limestone

Note: The first stanza of Alice Oswald’s “Dunt: a poem for a dried up river.” In an interview in the current Paris Review, Oswald talks about finding the structure of poem. “There is still only one way a free poem can be, it’s just that you’ve got to keep tinging it until the tinging comes out right.”

A Change of the Seasons

Our Spring Edition tells the fortunate story of an American icon that is also a bit sad. The Memo Books are on press now and we’re in pre-production for the film that will accompany it and we can’t wait to share them with you. Consider joining the thousands of people who have signed up for a year-long subscription to our limited editions so you’ll be the first to get it, along with all the other benefits of being a subscriber.

Thanks for reading. I’m working on a fun contest for next month, cya then.

---

^*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.

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 28th 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: Spring and Fowl, Elemental, Deal, Pressing Issues, Commonplace, Bird from Malta, You and I.

In With the New

The new year’s calendar is coming together. We have the Spring Limited Edition heading to press shortly. It’s a beautiful package with a surprising and familiar theme. Aside from restocking just about everything after a crazy end of the year (thanks for that) we have two other products on press currently.

You won’t be surprised to hear we’re sponsoring The Tournament of Books again this year. For the first time, one of my recommendations to the ToB made it onto the short list, so I’ll be pulling for the The Director by Daniel Kehlmann. This year’s ToB Memo Book design is fun and sales will raise funds for the American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans program.

The other product in the works combines a really old, really sweet story, a linocut from a favorite Chicago artist, and a ton of scholarly research from Bryan. You’ll see that in a couple weeks.

Periodically, We Get Mail

“Color war is an annual tradition at my high school. My class had the potential to be the first ever to win three color wars across their tenure, so pressure was high.”

“Everyone began strategizing, figuring out which events they would best serve our team in. I typically participate in ‘the big moment,’ a head-to-head competition where students from each grade are given a mystery challenge to study for and then complete on stage, in front of the entire school. I didn't know what to expect, and was concerned when I was handed my task: recite the entire periodic table of elements, in order! My competitors turned to ChatGPT, or an earworm-y song. But I knew what I had to do: go analog.”

“This single Field Notes page was crammed with my various memorization tactics. The most effective is boxed in blue, where I clumped elements into groups of 2-5 in a row. On stage, I got over twice as far as my competitors, passing 60 consecutive elements before skipping two due to crowd pressure.”

“We won color war by 950 points, a 25% margin. And it was an incredibly collaborative effort. But my piece of the victory is partially yours, and I thought it was worth sharing.”

Congratulations to Pierce M. and the Class of 2026. As you might expect, we’re sending Pierce a “Group Eleven” Edition 3-Pack.

Ink, Paper, and Muscle

Here are the three finished posters we made with Nashville’s legendary letterpress shop, Hatch Show Print. After they printed them we cut them up to make the covers for our Fall 2022 Memo Books. Aside from a small number of packs on the Rarities Shelf at HQ, the “Hatch Show Print” Edition is now sold out.

Related: We sent Aaron Draplin to Hatch to document the process in our film, Rubbing Elbows with Ghosts.

Singular Perspectives

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.

We are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.

Note: It’s a lovely thing when one of your children discovers one of your favorite stories on her own, and then tells you about it. My daughter recently sent me a note to check out Kurt Vonnegut’s tale of heading out to buy a single envelope. Watch KV tell it himself in a 2004 lecture at Case Western University, the story starts around 24 minutes in. Also, the story originally appears in A Man Without a Country.

In unease the earth turned itself inside
out when its gravity fled. All of us
fell off the earth.

Note: Jim Harrison died on March 26, 2016. He was found at his writing desk with a notebook opened to this page, a draft of an untitled poem. For twenty years Joseph Bednarik served as Harrison’s poetry editor. He also made a pilgrimage to view the Harrison archives.

Blank First Page

We’re always happy to see a new episode of Lukas Grech’s video series about Field Notes and other stationery issues. He recently focused on our “1943” Edition which includes 2-Way Memo Books and the Field Notes Brand Books reprint of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

Note: Lukas was born and raised in Malta, so he probably knows the real story behind the Falcon and The Grand Master of the Order of St John.

Always in Love

Remember when we paired each member of Wilco with an exceptional artist, handed them all the same limited palette of colors, and let them improvise? Yeah, that was cool. Steve’s film rocks too.

And like pretty much everything Field Notes related, it came to you via Chicago. 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.

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 27th 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: 1943, Deal, Pod, J’Accuse, Mother Road, Wrap, Poetry & Prose, Chronological, 60642

Things were very busy for Black Friday-Cyber Monday. We have extra hands in the warehouse and are cranking the orders out. If yours hasn’t shipped just yet it will be on the way in the next couple days.

Over There

Thanks to our subscribers and everyone who has purchased our new “1943” Edition and The Field Notes Brand Books reissue of The Maltese Falcon in the format of the World War II Armed Service Editions. I’m frequently asked whether we worry that we’ll run out of new ideas for our limited editions. But really, there are unlimited ways to go. Look at it this way, it took us fifteen years and 69 releases to figure out we could put the staples on the short side of a memo book. For Rick Kogan’s piece about this release in the the Chicago Tribune we talked a little about that and I said that we don’t really worry about things, we just take it on faith that if we are curious about something and excited about the research and process, people like us will dig it too.

Talking Book

We started a new podcast to dive a little deeper into subjects that are best examined through conversation. I’m not sure how often we will record new episodes, but when we can bring new voices and expertise to a subject, we’ll take advantage of those opportunities.

By hosting a conversation between Kevin Guilfoile, who edited, and wrote the forward for our Field Notes Brand Books reissue of The Maltese Falcon, and Molly Manning, author of When Books Went to War, we could really get into the story of the Armed Services Editions that served as the inspiration for our “1943” Edition.

While setting things up we discovered that there are a bunch of podcasts with “Field Notes” in their title. None of them have anything to do with us, but it seemed wise to use a name that would be unique and easily searchable. You can find out more about and listen to the Staple Day Podcast at our site and subscribe to it on Apple, Spotify, and pretty much everywhere else.

Related: An excellent illustrated article by Jennifer Schuessler from 2023 on “pocket-size paperback weapons in the fight for democracy.”

Whodunnit

Our Wednesday Murder Club Memo Book, which we gave away as a gift-with-purchase in late October, contained a puzzle. The challenge was to identify the killer and the weapon used in a crime. Not many people got it right, and we randomly chose ten of them as prize winners.

The puzzle was created by Sandy Weisz and Mao Reynolds of The Mystery League. Sandy has explained how the whole the whole thing worked. Look at the photo at the top of his solution. The weapon seems obvious, and by now you know we had other plans for the murderer too.

Page 362

“Here is the diary of a book and it will be interesting to see how it works out.” June 1, 1938, John Steinbeck starts writing The Grapes of Wrath.

Martini Shot

While were were constructing a film set, and also a big mess at HQ, we shot a quick behind-the-scenes sequence about the making of Spade and Archer, our homage to the opening shot of the great 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon. Like all of our films, this was produced and directed by Steve Delahoyde, and like most of them (and our notebooks) it was made using analog, practical methods.^†

Digging

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.

Noli timere

Note: Poet Seamus Heaney texted this Latin phrase to his wife, Marie, minutes before he died in August of 2013. It translates as “Do not be afraid.” Ulta O Broin wrote about this in Multilingual Magazine back then. I’m thinking about Heaney this week while waiting for my copy of the new compendium of his work. The Poems of Seamus Heaney. Here’s a lovely review by Robert Pinsky.

A character “is making their case to you the reader, like they’re making their case before God, and while you might not agree with them, at least you get the world according to them.”

Note: Author Spencer Ackerman talking about his novel Sheepdogs. I was happy to see this wildly entertaining tale on the just-announced Long List for the 2026 Tournament of Books. If the ToB awarded its annual prize for “the novel that would make the greatest Coen Brothers movie,” Sheepdogs would be a shoo-in to take home the Rooster.

Clicking Through the Seasons

We needed a quick way to click through to the product page of any of our Quarterly Limited Editions, going back to 2009. So I put together a simple list and thought it might be handy for you too. To see what we add next to this roster, consider joining the thousands of people who have signed up for a year-long subscription.

In Person

A week from Saturday, December 13th, we’ll be hosting our annual Holiday Market at HQ in Chicago. It’s going to be a blast. Here are the details. Also, the Shop at HQ is open from 9-5 every weekday until 12/23. Hope to see you here soon.

Um, there’s a reason we selected the books we selected on the inside back cover of The Falcon. Drop me a note if you noticed that. TTY 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.

^†Field Notes is, and will always be, 100% A.I.-free. We proudly take full responsibility for our own hallucinations.