Tag: Field Notes

Field Notes America the Beautiful and Night Sky Edition Now Available

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Field Notes: America the Beautiful. Now available on our website.

Spring 2013: America The Beautiful Edition. Printed 3/13, Edition size: 45,000 books. Proudly Printed and Manufactured in the U.S.A.

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Each book measures 3-1/2″ wide by 5-1/2″ tall and is bound with a rugged three-staple saddle-stitch process. Durable Materials, Pocket Size.

When you think of FIELD NOTES, two things should be abundantly clear by now: first, obviously, we are obsessed with the design and variety of pocket notebooks of the twentieth century. Second, simply put, we love the U.S.A. The good, the bad, the corny, the deep; all of it. Our commitment to American materials and labor is well known.

As we set out to create the eighteenth COLORS limited edition, we dug into Aaron’s collection of vintage memo books for inspiration, and set out to pay tribute to the cross-country-road-trip spirit of America, via the vibrant full-color aesthetic of the beautifully-roughhewn memo books and road maps of the 1960s.

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In today’s world of computerized precision, it was challenging to find anything but the brightest-white paper, and our printer takes great pride in perfection. Printing oversaturated photos on yellowed paper, with a purposefully out-of-register 100-line screen, was nearly outside the capabilities of modern machinery and left pressmen scratching their heads. But we made it happen! The dust has settled, and we present our beefiest FIELD NOTES ever. Colorful stock photography of “Spacious Skies,” “Amber Waves,” and “Mountains Majesty” are reproduced in full-color on heavyweight, off-white, Tango-coated one-side covers, and stuffed with 48 pages of burly Finch “Soft White” paper ruled with “Looseleaf Blue” ink. They’re bound together with shiny copper staples, and as always: they’re manufactured in the very nation they celebrate.

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Each 3-Pack includes an “America the Beautiful” water-transfer decal inspired by the ubiquitous decals that mid-century tourists proudly applied to their Samsonite, Airstream, or Chevy Bel-Air. The decal is screen-printed in fluorescent colors on a clear backing, waiting to be briefly soaked in water and applied to an inviting, soon-to-be-more-attractive surface.


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Field Notes: Night Sky Edition. Now available on our website.

Summer 2013: Night Sky Edition. Printed 6/13, Edition size: 45,000 books. Proudly Printed and Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Countless lines of prose, poetry, and music have been written in hopes of capturing the magic of a summer night, but leave it to FIELD NOTES to take an inexplicably transcendent feeling and distill it down to basic science: it’s the stars. If you live in the city, you may often forget that there are more than a handful of ’em up there. But if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere without light pollution, seeing the Milky Way stretched across the sky on a moonless summer night never gets old.

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Our nineteenth edition of FIELD NOTES COLORS celebrates the wonders that cross the summer sky each night. The “Night Sky” 3-Pack features French Construction “Blacktop” covers, mapping out three sets of constellations that have graced the northern hemisphere summer sky long before “summer” was given a name. Constellations and popular asterisms are highlighted in silver holographic foil. Inside is our usual beloved Finch Opaque text paper, with a new “Reticle Graph,” sort of a hybrid of our popular dot-grid and graph papers. It’s all bound together with shiny black staples.

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Choosing the sections of sky to depict involved a lot of research. Illustrating thousands of stars was a lot of work. But even after all that, and a self-taught crash course in astrophotography, we weren’t prepared for two amazing nights at Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada.

There’s only so much information we can cram into a 3.5- x 5.5-inch pocket notebook, but our love of 4-point Futura is well known, so cram we did. The three books are roughly aligned to midnight in the northern hemisphere in early, mid-, and late summer, and replacing our usual “Practical Applications” the inside back covers features corresponding facts and tips to help get your stargazing underway. After a clear night and maybe a cocktail or two, you’ll impress your friends by finding Arcturus, pointing out the Summer Triangle, and locating the “Andromeda Galaxy” M-31, all with your naked eye!

August 2013 links

Various links we shared via our social network accounts for August 2013:

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August 15: Found on the web http://fuckyeahbookarts.tumblr.com/

“A blog for creative types interested in the (un)conventional world of Book Arts! Posts here will feature artist’s books, illustration, book binding, typography, sketch-booking, scrap-booking, print-making, paper making, altered books, how to guides, zines, paper engineering and more!”


August 17: Recommended viewing to our journal / notebook buyers. Bullet Journal


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August 18: Let’s play a game. Name the book based on its word cloud. Post your scores! http://www.sporcle.com/games/ubergerber/word-cloud-titles


 

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August 21: How does reading affect your senses? From one of our dear customers, Reading: A Feast for the Senses –http://jennifernon.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/reading-a-feast-for-the-senses/


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August 23: The Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebookhttp://www.artofmanliness.com/2010/08/23/the-manly-tradition-of-the-pocket-notebook/


And we leave you with image of the month from Twitter user @lilynovels

Books + Cat combo, from Twitter user @lilynovels

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All images from their appropriate linked website.

Field Notes Colors: The Expedition Edition now available!

Field Notes Expedition

Field Notes: Expedition Edition is the 17th release of the Field Notes Colors special edition.

via Field Notes:

“FNC-17? marks the start of our fifth year of FIELD NOTES COLORS. In that time, we’ve explored a wide variety of papers, colors, and printing techniques, but with this new “EXPEDITION” edition, for the first time, we’ve actually expanded the basic utility of our notebooks.

Aesthetically, you’ll find an all-new design with plenty to like: a hi-visibility “Antarctic Survey Orange” front cover and “Polar Night Black” back cover, with a subtle varnish effect featuring a topographic map of Antarctica. The body pages feature our popular ‘dot grid’ graph paper, printed in light gray.

But the real innovation here is the paper. It’s maybe not even fair to call it paper. The whole book is printed on Yupo Synthetic paper, an amazing water- and tear-proof paper extruded from polypropylene pellets in Chesapeake, Virginia. We could go on and on about our new books’ durability and incredible properties, and we will, in this series of 12 (reasonably) scientific tests:

TEST 1: WATERPROOF (Pass)
TEST 2: VISIBILITY (Pass)
TEST 3: WIND RESISTANCE (Pass)
TEST 4: BALLISTICS (Pass)
TEST 5: VACUUM (Pass)
TEST 6: TENSILE STRENGTH (Pass)
TEST 7: COMPRESSION (Pass)
TEST 8: ACID RESISTANCE (Pass)
TEST 9: FLAME RESISTANCE (Fail, but fun to watch)
TEST 10: EXTREME TEMPERATURE (Pass)

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TEST 11: ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES (Pass)
TEST 12: ELECTRICAL RESISTANCE (Pass)

Months of development and testing were required to get these books just right, and we’d like to thank Yupo for their extensive support, as well as the great printers and ink technicians that pitched in to help.

The majority of our customers may not test the limits of these books, but the map of Antarctica is neither hyperbole nor coincidence. We’ll be sending the “EXPEDITION” edition to the South Pole with explorer Ben Saunders as he and his team retrace Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated journey to the Pole and back, on foot and unsupported, starting in October 2013. More on that soon.

Field Notes Expedition Ink Test

Note: Synthetic paper is nonporous and doesn’t absorb ink like our conventional papers.

Our new “Expedition” FIELD NOTES are pretty close to invincible, at least by notebook standards, but waterproof paper is nonporous and doesn’t soak up ink like most paper. That’s good in some ways (no bleeding, feathering, or show-through), but it does limit the writing implements you can use. Regular ball-point pens and pencils work fine, but pens that lay down a lot of ink, like fountain pens, rollerballs, and markers, don’t dry as quickly, and may smudge and/or come off on the opposite page (as seen in the last example in the photo).

Your “Expedition” 3-Pack is wrapped in a bellyband made of the same Yupo paper that’s in the books, so (after trying to tear it!) you can test your pens there and see what works best.

Field Notes COLORS: The Expedition Edition and other Field Notes products are exclusively available on Avalon.ph (PhP450.00).

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