Day 130: Today's Pick — Field Notes Pocket Notebook

I want to write today about a notebook that costs about five dollars and that I have been buying in three-packs for sixteen years.

Field Notes are made by a small Chicago design firm — Coudal Partners and Draplin Design Co., founded in 2007 — based on a pamphlet aesthetic from American agricultural extension offices in the 1940s and 50s. The original Field Notes were modeled, almost line-for-line, on the kraft-cover memo books that traveling seed-corn salesmen used to carry, with the customer's name printed on the cover, a list of fields and acreages inside, and a simple spec sheet on the back. The modern Field Notes copy this format and update it for the rest of us: a 48-page staple-bound notebook, three and a half by five and a half inches, kraft-paper cover, ruled or graph or dot-grid interior, three to a pack for $13.95.

That is the entire product.

What I want to recommend is not the notebook so much as the philosophy of the notebook, which Field Notes printed on the back cover of the very first edition: "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now."

This is the magic. The Field Notes is small enough to live in your back pocket — and after a week of being sat on, it takes on a slight curve that means it cannot live anywhere else. It is cheap enough that you do not, when you crack the cover for the first time, feel the small paralysis of "what if I waste this beautiful page on a grocery list?" It is the opposite of a Moleskine. The Moleskine asks you to be a great writer. The Field Notes asks you, instead, to write things down.

I have, in a small drawer, every Field Notes I have ever filled. The first one is from 2010 and contains, among other things: an address in Lisbon I have lost twice; a list of names of people I met at a dinner party I cannot remember the location of; the rough sketch of a logo for a friend's company that no longer exists; the lyrics to a song I never finished; a phone number with no name. The whole book is approximately two thirds full and was discontinued, by me, when it survived a washing machine cycle but became too soft to write in.

That is the entire arc of a Field Notes. You crack it open. You use it like a normal person uses an iPhone notes app, except you don't, because the iPhone is in your other pocket. You fill it up over six or eight months. You start a new one. You forget the old one in a drawer. Years later you open it and remember things that, without the small kraft cover and the cheap paper, would not have come back.

A few notes for new buyers. The standard "Original Kraft" three-pack is the right starter. Once you've gone through one, the COLORS limited editions — Field Notes does four special-edition releases per year, each in a different paper, cover, theme — are worth a subscription if you can get on the waitlist. They sell out. Some of them are pretty rare on resale. (The "Two Rivers" edition is, in 2025, going for around $90 a pack on the secondary market. This is unhinged. Do not let yourself become that person.)

A pencil-versus-pen note. Field Notes paper is good for pencil and most ballpoint and rollerball inks. Fountain pens with wet nibs will bleed through; if you are a fountain pen person, look at Field Notes' "Pitch Black" or one of their occasional special editions on heavier stock. For a normal pen — Pilot G2, Bic Cristal, a sharp HB pencil — the standard paper is excellent.

A small final note. There is a category of object whose function is not the thing itself but the use of the thing. A Field Notes notebook in your drawer is worth nothing. A Field Notes notebook in your back pocket, soft from sweat and rain and a year of being sat on, is worth quite a lot. The pick today is the back-pocket habit, with the notebook as the prompt. Buy a three-pack. Use up the first one as fast as you can. Do not preserve. Do not curate. The whole point is to fill it.

Then start the next one.