Materials: Paper, staples
Price: US $9.99 per 3-pack.
Vendor: Themselves.
Primary Strength: Quality Paper
Primary Weakness: Still Looking
Verdict: Basically the perfect pocket notebook.
Company Background:
Field Notes Brand is a joint venture between Coudal Partners and Draplin Design Company, both names familiar to readers of the RCX. Their excellent semi-commercial blogs aren't a reason to love Field Notes, but they don't hurt, either.
The fine details of how this alliance came to be are unknown to me, so I can't pass them on to you. Maybe they'll regale us with one or more versions of the Field Notes origin myth on one or more of their sites. (Hint!)
Details:
Fig. 1: Details here, pretty much. Click to go zoom.
You can see for yourself below how much pride of provenance DDC/CP take in their product. When manufacturers put this all out there, you know they believe in what they're doing. Sometimes the product is still junk (I'm looking at you, Tom's of Maine GingerMint toothpaste. Why wait all night to develop morning breath when you can just squeeze it straight from a tube?), but it's still nice to see sources and methods listed.
Other printing on this book includes absolutely perfectly proportioned and placed blocks to put owner info, record the dates of use, and offer or decline to offer a reward if lost and found.
Fig. 2: I cannot express how much I heart this frontispiece.
Serious times, folks.
The design is awesome, as should be expected. The color is unassuming and honest, the font is reassuring, the proportions are fucking perfect, the rounded colors are thoughtful, and the size pretty much couldn't be better for any pocket: shirt, front, ass, vest, wherever.
OK, maybe it'd get lost in the inner breast pocket of a business suit, but that's not where it's meant to be anyway. Get a real job, you office stiff.
The real kicker with these things is the paper. Man, so smooth! So thick and heavy, too. As much as I love my pencils, I always feel like a grid filled with anything but ink is almost wasted. This paper handles the loosest inks from my wettest pens and never allows any feathering or bleeding.
--OK, slight qualification to the above. Sometimes some bleedthrough and feathering occur where my pen clips have abraded the pages, but what do you expect? As manufactured, the paper is nothing short of fantastic.
Fig. 3: Use number 24 from the inner back cover: Treasure Maps.
This was my route on a day when I found my money clip,
a Grail pencil (no, that's not a brand name), and went to my first
Le Corbusier building. A fine day, indeed.
Also: light brown graph paper is perfect. Graph paper rules. Even if you can't draw at all, it's great. In fact, especially if you can't draw at all it's great. It helps you develop a sense of proportionality to things. Plus, you can rotate the notebook to write all the way down a 2-page spread, if you want (idea stolen from Andy at Pencil Things). The light brown ink is a great choice. I use brown ink on a daily basis, but it's a lot darker than this, so it's always easy to discern the two. Any print color that's not purple, blue, or insipid aqua is a relief, frankly.
Are they durable? Fuhgeddaboutit. If this thing falls apart before you fill it, it means one of two things: Either your memory is good enough that you don't actually need a pocket notebook, or (more likely) it's so bad that you forget to use your notebook when you should.
Fig. 4: L to R- 3 weeks in Japan, 6 weeks (so far) in Grenada, as yet unused.
My first one lasted 3+ weeks, collecting rubber stamp impressions in Japan, drawing maps, scrawling frequently-encountered kanji, and generally getting soaked with pocket sweat in sweltering miserable subtropical big city heat, and it didn't miss a lick.
Fig. 5: From the Tokyo Tobacco and Salt Museum. You heard me.
When we went there, an activity table was full of children who
were seemingly learning to make aluminum foil pipes.
I shit you not.
#2 is going on 6 weeks now (I don't need to draw as many maps at home, and don't get to collect as many rubber stamps from landmarks) with no complaints, and we're in the height of rainy (read: muggy, humid, hot, hurricane) season here in Grenada, so that's saying something.
Fig. 6 : Touristy places in Japan love to have stamps to give visitors, and visitors love to have books in which to collect them. This one is from the Osaka Aquarium (Awesome - best aquarium ever, best city in Japan), which is home to not one, but two goddamn whale sharks! Cool as hell.
The only even slightly negative thing I could say about this product is the "intentional" "ironic" usage of "unnecessary quotation marks". Look, I like Draplin's humor, and I think I know what he's going for with the punctuation bukkake, but when you put "All FIELD NOTES memo books are proudly, 'Made in America.'", I honestly don't know what you mean. I'm assuming that these are actually made in America (as indicated on the outer back cover), rather than "Made in America" (as indicated on the inner back cover), which could mean almost anything.
Fig. 7: So, I am supposed to use staples for posting?
Meh. It has nothing to do with the outstanding overall quality of the product, it just sticks in my craw. Well done all around, really.
The Bottom Line: It's basically perfect. See 'Verdict' section above. See also my post of a few months ago about the virtue of carrying a pencil and some paper with you at all times. This consumption item fits the bill precisely.
Second Opinions: Way too many to list here. Go to the Field Notes page, see lower left for an exhaustive list of "reviews", many of which are just photos and mentions with no description or critical analysis whatsoever (see what I did there?).
Posts
|