❧ One Year with Field Notes ❧
October 2024 is my one year anniversary of regularly using Field Notes notebooks. I wanted to take a moment to mark the occasion, talk about what's changed for me, and how I plan to use my Field Notes going forward. I have journaled more regularly in the pat year than in the previous two or three years due to Field Notes. I also go back and revisit what I've journaled about more often because once I finish a notebook I read it through from beginning to end. Not only has it had a positive effect on my personal writing habits, but I've really enjoyed the community to be found on the Field Nuts Facebook group--the only reason in several years why I have posted anything to Facebook.
Here are some insights in no particular order:
* My personal guideline: filling the notebooks is more important than buying, trading, looking at, or talking about them. My favorite posts on the Field Nuts group are ones where people show how they're using their books. It can be easy to get caught up in trading, or in ogling rare editions, but in the end I remind myself that what's important to me is using them.
* One thing I've learned by hanging out in the Field Nuts community is that, even within a subculture, people are there for different reasons. Some people are completionist collectors while others are prolific users. I'm neither, but that's OK. Everyone has their own thing they bring to the table. (Except the folks who are just there to flip notebooks for a profit; I will probably always give those folks some side-eye.)
* It's all about singles and limited editions for me! As much as I love these notebooks, I have not become a Field Notes quarterly subscriber. It's a $120 annual fee and I debated for a number of months about whether or not to sign up. I'm glad I waited because I realized that the subscription model they have just isn't in line with how I use notebooks. (Don't worry, they got far more than $120 from me this year.) Field Notes almost always are sold in three packs and...I just don't like using more than one of the same book. I like the variety of having a bunch of random singles to choose from. With the subscription, you get two copies of the same three pack (with some variation) and that's just not my cup of tea. When getting a new three pack I always open it up and trade at least one away.
* The numbers as they stand right now: 14 filled, 7 in use, 52 to use, 54 given or traded away, 9 on deck to give or trade away. 136 total books--the equivalent of 45 3-packs and 1 single--have passed through my hands this year.
* Cost: $509.01 for the whole year, as far as I can reckon. An average of $42.42 a month. This includes the cost of mailing trades, as well as some stationery I bought specifically for the purpose of including in trades. This hobby has basically been funded by credit card rewards--which are free money for me because I don't carry a balance on my credit cards. How you feel about someone spending $500 on pocket notebooks in a year is up to you. To me, it's an embarrassingly large amount of money, although it's nothing compared to a lot of the wheeling and dealing out there.
* How I use them has gotten simpler: At first, I used my notebooks as bullet journals. I would start with an index, number the pages, and draw a rule on each one. After 6 or 7 months, I stopped ruling the pages, and then just recently I got a ways into a notebook before noticing that I hadn't numbered the pages and didn't really need to. So now I just open it and write!
* Innards: I began the year thinking that I would mostly want to write on dot grid. I grudgingly accepted graph and I did not think I would like using lined books. But you never know how you'll feel about something until actually using it. At this point, blank books are the only ones I really avoid.
* What I DON'T like: perfect binding. I know that Field Notes uses a fancy version of perfect binding called PUR, but it's all the same to me. This is when you stack individual sheets and glue them together along the spine instead of folding sheets in half and securing them with staples or stitching. Hand bookbinders almost universally hate perfect binding. It's great for cheap, ephemeral things like magazines and manuals, but perfect binding will inevitably fall apart and should not be used for anything that's meant to be kept around for decades. I was at an event last year where preservation experts showed people how to preserve all kinds of media, from books to VHS tapes. People would bring in old perfect bound paperbacks that were falling apart (often copies of The Lord of the Rings from the 1970s) and ask how they could preserve them. Unfortunately, the only solution is to go back in time and get emotionally attached to a better bound book. (That's not what they said. What they actually said was just to store it in an acid-free box or wrapper and hope that helps slow down the decay.) While I believe Field Note's claim that PUR binding holds up better that regular perfect binding, another issue to me here is the gutter that binding style creates. For a notebook that's only 3.5" wide, a half-inch gutter is unacceptably large in my opinion. I find PUR bound Field Notes, whatever their other merits, to be essentially unusable.
* After almost a year of writing in teeny tiny scrawl to fill each line of the grid notebooks, I realized that I don't like the experience of writing this way, nor what it does to my handwriting. So I gave myself permission to write on every other line. This means I will fill grid notebooks twice as quickly as I had previously, but more importantly it gives my handwriting some room to breathe. I am interested to see what my total notebook count will be in 2025 compared to 2024 as a result. I know some people get really intimidated by folks who burn through a notebook every couple of weeks, but there are so many factors: people who have big handwriting, or are using the notebook for sketches, or use them for things like lists that leave a lot of blank space on the page. It's motivating to have a new notebook to look forward to, but I don't need to move through them as quickly as possible.
* Storage: I have deliberately limited the spaces where I can store my notebooks. I got an Archival Wooden Box (which I didn't like as much as I thought I would, but it'll do the job.) Over the next couple of years, I hope to fill it with completely used` notebooks. My storage for unused notebooks is a little wooden IKEA crate that I can fit about 90 notebooks into if I cram them every which way.