As this fast-paced planet spins, let us tell you about the simple pleasures and utility of Chicago-made Field Notes
Jim Coudal was very happy as an ad man, his Coudal Partners advertising agency working with such high profile clients as Lettuce Entertain You, the Blackhawks, White Sox (“Good Guys Wear Black”) and the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“I liked the ad game and we had good clients,” he told me.
That is what he did for years until 2007, when he received a Christmas gift in the mail that changed his career and his life.
The gift was from a friend, a Portland, Oregon designer named Aaron Draplin. It was a small but handsomely produced notebook, one of about 200 that Draplin had created and sent to some of his pals.
A few days later, Draplin called Coudal.
“So, what do you think of my stupid little note book?,” he said.
Coudal, very impressed by the little book, said, “Maybe it’s not so stupid.”
They talked. Draplin explained that his creation had been inspired by the “agricultural memo books” that he had long been collecting. These were small notebooks that were given out by all sorts of companies as promotional items starting at the turn of the 20th century and rested in the pockets of, and were used by, farmers across the land. Draplin had found them at flea markets and farm sales. He eventually had thousands of them and they were the inspiration for his gifts.
In short order, Coudal Partners formed a partnership with Draplin Design Co. and created what they called Field Notes Brand. They first produced 500 packs of three notebooks with bright orange covers and put them up for sale on the web sites operated by the pair. The first day they received 13 orders. The next day there were more and soon the 500 were gone and a business took flight, becoming what can only be called a welcome phenomenon.
“This little note book eventually took over our business,” Coudal said. “It wasn’t long before we fired all of our clients and now this is all we do.”
Coudal and 10 employees work in offices in the Near West Side. They have sold millions of these notebooks and a host of other related products such as pens, T-shirts, pencils.
“We have thousands of customers worldwide,” Coudal says. “We sell a lot online and also in some, but very few, bookstores. We really aren’t available at what one might think of as conventional stationery stores. And you won’t find us in Walmart but rather, maybe, in a surf shop.”
From the beginning, the regular line of products has been embellished by quarterly limited editions, which have been increasingly successful and coveted and available to subscribers and one-time buyers. The first one sold 500. The latest, 36,000.
The notebooks are crafted with care given to typeface and paper, and are produced in the United States. Special editions have been devoted to such self-explanatory subjects as “National Parks,” “Mackinaw Autumn” and “Dime Novel,” and such less obvious topics as “Clandestine,” “Vignette” and “Heavy Duty.”
I have watched this steady march of notebooks since the onset and my favorite was the three-pack “Day Game” in the summer of 2012, with covers that were “Outfield Green, Infield Brown, and Hardball White.” It came with a small book, a 30,000 word memoir about baseball and the link between fathers and sons. It was titled “A Drive into the Gap” and was written by Kevin Guilfoile who used to work with Coudal before becoming a successful novelist with the publication of his “Cast of Shadows” in 2005 and 2010′s “The Thousand.”
There have been 55 of these limited editions, available to subscribers at a yearly $120 cost, and individually for far less. The latest arrived Tuesday and is called “Great Lakes.” It is the first five notebook set to be offered. Each 48-page book features one of the lakes, and each contains a fold-out map and an astonishing amount of information and thoughtfully-mined trivia. The Lake Michigan book, for instance, not only tells us that the lake’s deepest point is 925 feet and that it is 579 feet above sea level but also that Chinook salmon, native to the Pacific Northwest, were introduced to Lake Michigan in the 1870s and that its “preferred meal” is alewives. Each of the Great Lakes notebooks offer a clever list of “practical applications,” and the specifications of production, the hows and whys and wheres of creation.
A bonus to the Great Lakes edition is a gathering of five postcards, one for each lake. These are inspired by and made in the style of those once produced by the Curt Teich Company, a Chicago firm founded in 1898 and a pioneer in the offset printing process. Before going out of business in 1978, this company had sold more than a billion postcards, making it the world’s largest printer of postcards. The Newberry Library has a massive collection of these cards.
Coudal explains how the “new” cards were made. “We sent Bryan Bedell (a designer who has been with Field Notes since its inception) and (filmmaker) Steve Delahoyde on a 1,300 mile trip around the Great Lakes to take photos, which we then colorized, retouched and added design elements.” The results are beautiful and haunting.
One of the firm’s slogans comes from Coudal’s grandfather, Nels, with whom he lived for a time after Nels’ wife’s death. He noticed that his grandfather was tearing pieces of newspaper in order to write notes on them.
He asked, “Grandpa, why don’t you just use a notebook. You might lose that little piece of paper.”
His grandfather said, “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”
Coudal now elaborates, saying, “I realized that the physical act of writing ingrains something in your brain much more than flipping it into an app, typing on a screen. People who are typing on their computer are transcribing. That’s not taking notes. Transcribing is listening and typing. It goes in your ears and out your fingers and you never hold onto it at all.”
For those of you who might consider this a nostalgia business, Coudal will tell you, “We don’t want to make a book that looks like it was made in the mid-1930s but a new book using the methods used then,” Coudal says. “We are not about nostalgia, not trying to be retro.
“First and foremost we make notebooks. You can use them to write ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ or to make a ‘milk, eggs, vodka’ shopping list.” We like to believe these are just as valuable to a hipster in the Brooklyn coffee shop as they are to someone in an ice fishing shanty in Duluth.”
What Field Notes is doing is honoring the past, telling a distinctively American story and doing it in an irresistibly artful way.
