Twenty Years of Kraft
Bryan Bedell, on the Field Notes Dispatches blog:
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.
I carry a Field Notes (or at least Field-Notes-sized — I dally with others, but always come home) notebook in my back pocket wherever I go. And because I’m a pack rat, I number, date, and keep them all. I just filled up volume 114 (9 Dec 2024 – 13 Jan 2025) and started volume 115 yesterday.
Funny enough, I started my pocket notebook habit in 2006, a year before Field Notes became a thing. And I was greatly dissatisfied with the various notebooks I’d tried prior to Field Notes. Hardcover Moleskines were too thick and uncomfortable to sit on, and their softcover notebooks started falling apart at the seams after just a few weeks. And then in 2007 my friend Jim Coudal offhandedly mentioned that he was starting a project with Aaron Draplin called Field Notes, and son of a bitch if the notebooks they were making weren’t exactly what I craved. The rest is history — a lot of ink, a lot of pages. Mostly nonsense, but some occasional gems and fond memories. The first page of my first notebook has a list of strollers to consider for my then-toddler son; he’s now a junior in college. And flipping through volume 4 just now, I came upon this one-page outline from September 2006 for a never-published episode in the Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme saga, wherein Brushed Metal, Aqua, and the just-released iTunes 7 visit a bitter classic Mac OS 9 Platinum theme on his deathbed in the hospital. (Platinum: “You fucked me on iTunes. The two of you.” And: “Steve never loved me, I’m the only one.”)
When in doubt, write it down.
★
Bryan Bedell, on the Field Notes Dispatches blog:
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.
I carry a Field Notes (or at least Field-Notes-sized — I dally with others, but always come home) notebook in my back pocket wherever I go. And because I’m a pack rat, I number, date, and keep them all. I just filled up volume 114 (9 Dec 2024 – 13 Jan 2025) and started volume 115 yesterday.
Funny enough, I started my pocket notebook habit in 2006, a year before Field Notes became a thing. And I was greatly dissatisfied with the various notebooks I’d tried prior to Field Notes. Hardcover Moleskines were too thick and uncomfortable to sit on, and their softcover notebooks started falling apart at the seams after just a few weeks. And then in 2007 my friend Jim Coudal offhandedly mentioned that he was starting a project with Aaron Draplin called Field Notes, and son of a bitch if the notebooks they were making weren’t exactly what I craved. The rest is history — a lot of ink, a lot of pages. Mostly nonsense, but some occasional gems and fond memories. The first page of my first notebook has a list of strollers to consider for my then-toddler son; he’s now a junior in college. And flipping through volume 4 just now, I came upon this one-page outline from September 2006 for a never-published episode in the Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme saga, wherein Brushed Metal, Aqua, and the just-released iTunes 7 visit a bitter classic Mac OS 9 Platinum theme on his deathbed in the hospital. (Platinum: “You fucked me on iTunes. The two of you.” And: “Steve never loved me, I’m the only one.”)
When in doubt, write it down.