Matt Ragland reviews Field Notes' 50th quarterly edition, a red-covered notebook with a matching desk ledger for subscribers. The ledger includes a checklist of all past editions and historical anecdotes about early Field Notes designs, staple counts, and special production details like brass-plate embossing.
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Hi everyone, my name is Matt and welcome back to my YouTube channel. In this video, I'm going to show you the 50th edition of the Field Notes pocket notebooks. I've been a Field Notes user for many years now and have been a subscriber to their quarterly editions. And what's really exciting about their most recent release is it is the 50th anniversary, not like annual anniversary, but the 50th release of these quarterly notebooks. I've been using them for years, like I said, and I want to show you and slash celebrate Field Notes what this 50th anniversary looks like. A really cool like additional thing that they included for subscribers, which is the subscriber anniversary desk ledger. This thing. I love the whole set, and so I want to show it to you, just give you a little heads up about it. I would highly recommend it if you're a fan of Field Notes and are not a subscriber to their, like, quarterly releases yet. This is a perfect time to pick it up. There's another video that I've done with this that I'll link in the end screen, in the description below. But thank you so much for checking out this video, and let's go ahead and get into it. So here's your look at the 50th anniversary edition of the quarterly subscription. So this is a pretty standard Field Notes notebook. I do— the red really pops, and I like the keyhole porthole here to signify that it's a 50th, 50th edition. And then we're just looking at very standard graph paper, so nothing too special with the actual, like, notebook edition. So we're not going to spend any time on that Easter egg that's hidden here. Is— I believe that these 3 colors are the colors of the first 3 editions, and these 5 colors right here are the colors of the first 5 editions. Let's take a look into the Desk Ledger now because this is really the prettiest part of all this. Now the dimensions of the Desk Ledger are 8.5 by 5 and it's dot grid, so I could definitely see myself using this. Here are all of the editions that they had and the first one, just as a little story time, The first one that I remember having personally besides just the standard kind of brown, the first special edition, I believe, I know my dad had the Grass Stain Green. And the first one that I can remember having myself was the County Fair Edition for probably North Carolina, Florida, states that I lived in at the time. That was in summer 2010, and it's still in print. As you scroll through the gallery, you'll see all of the different editions that have come out. I know I bought packs of the Expedition, America the Beautiful, I have the Two Rivers series, I have the Utility Book, Campfire, Dime Novel, Coastline. So all of these I've really, really liked over the years. What you have at the beginning of this, besides a really cool like, you know, kind of cutout style, is it just gives you the kind of the history of what they saw field notes could be. So there used to be like these Agrico memo books. There's just all these like really cool little like details about it. Approximate number of staples, 3 per book, used in the binding of 50 quarterly editions, 9 million staples. Like cool anecdotes about the program. They shipped Smarties in— they shipped the Smarties candy with the Sweet Tooth Edition. And just a bunch of like cool little numbers, things that you like might find curious. The America's Best Idea program, or which is the national parks one that I really, that I really liked. It took 10 hours to carve each of the brass plates used as dies in the embossing and debossing of the Autumn Trilogy series. Like here's, here's an example of one of those. So if you're a fan of Field Notes, if you've gotten them before, then I totally recommend like picking up this subscription. Now you do have to get an entire like year subscription to get the desk ledger. You can still order the 50th edition by itself, but if you want the whole pack and this like subscriber anniversary ledger, you can have like— it has checklists for all the quarterly editions. Just a bunch of the story around it. I've like— just as someone who's used these for years now, I find really fascinating. And I hope this gives you a little bit more of an idea of what to expect or what to like about it. And maybe it's something that you want to pick up for yourself. A couple recent quarterly editions of Field Notes that I've really liked— you can always get their standard memo book, but a couple releases that I have enjoyed recently and I believe are still available, one is this Group 11, which is a little bit thicker paper. It also has that kind of bronze-gold trim on the side, which just gives it a little extra touch of class. The paper itself is a little heavier as well. And same thing for the snowy— I believe it's called Snowy Evening? Snowy Day? Snowy, snow, snow. Snowy Evening Edition. But I really like both of these. They're both a dot grid layout, which for those of us who are bullet journalists really like the dot grid. Their standard layout is just a square kind of graph paper style, but there's also plain, there's whatever, whatever. There is an addition to fit you. So I'm not being sponsored or compensated or even affiliated with Field Notes in any way except that I've been using their products for a number of years. It is a great quick grab notebook for the back pocket, for your purse, for your backpack, whatever, like easy place you want to stash a notebook for, you know, jotting down ideas. As Field Notes says, I'm not I'm not writing it down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now. And I think a lot of us can resonate with that kind of statement. So if you aren't a quarterly subscriber yet, I would definitely like start with the 50. Oh, and I didn't even mention the National Park series. I love the National Park series. And so if you haven't started this yet, it's definitely worth doing. I will say that you will have more Field Notes notebooks than you know what to do with, for better or for worse, because they often just like throw an extra 3-pack in there for you. And you can see Like, even in this one that I got, they sent me 6, and I go through maybe one per— I go through maybe one per month. So I have tons of these things. I give them away to friends. I stash them in backpacks that I may not even use for a while. I put them in the car. I have a Field Notes notebook pretty much everywhere that I might need access to it. But it's just a really good way to capture ideas. And then, like we've talked about in the fast to durable note transition makes it really easy to make sure that even if I'm flipping through, I want to capture some ideas, I want to get them out of my brain and onto paper. Field Notes makes it really easy to do that. So thank you so much for watching this video. Make sure you check out the other videos that I have about Field Notes in the end screen and the description below, and look for more videos like this coming out soon. Thanks so much everybody, bye! From love.
