Editing The Pen Addict 279/transcript (section)

== Production Process ==


'''Brian Bedell:''' Yeah, we don't over-promise. We might over-promise, but we don't under-deliver. I think they're usually good. Nice one. That's fair. Over-promise, over-deliver. We do, there's a lot, it's hard to not navel-gaze and do what we want to do for ourselves. And usually, that works out for us. You know, we can keep it mixed up and do different things. But we do have to remember, especially with subscribers, they need to, you know, it needs to work for anyone. It needs to have universal appeal, really. So, we get a lot of requests for very specific things, and we try to keep real general and mix things up just so there's a big variety. And subscribers are at least getting, you know, three of the four they get in the year, something they get really excited about, and the other one they can gift. You know, we're never going to get everyone happy with every edition. And that bothered us for a while, and then we got over that pretty fast because we realized no matter what we do, people are getting a few containers.

'''Jim Coudal:''' This is kind of weird, but the thing that got us over worrying too much about the public reaction, the vocal public reaction to a particular product was actually America the Beautiful, which is one of our favorite editions. And we could talk about that for a long time because there's a lot of really interesting production details on that one. But when we made it, Aaron and Brian and I, and I think everybody here, were so excited that we had really hit the vibe of vintage farm co-op notebooks and the printing process. And when they were launched, they were launched to silence. People didn't know what to do about it because they had never seen an image on the cover of a field notes. They didn't know what to do with it. And we were a little bit, we felt a little bad about that. But then they got mailed out. And over time, and actually a pretty long period of time, they've become one of the most beloved editions that we've ever done.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It was very ambitious, like in every respect, right? That was when the paper got thicker too, right? Yeah. With America the Beautiful. Like there were a lot of things going on with that edition. Yes, there was. But it was so dramatically different.

'''Jim Coudal:''' But it wasn't such a step away from, for example, National Crop in terms of its focus and its vibe. So I think in a way we decided at that point, or it didn't decide anything, but we started to feel like, you know, if Aaron and Brian and Jim and Matt and Steve feel, and Michelle and everyone, Eric, everybody feels something about that, then we're doing the right thing. And then let's let the product work for itself. So to go back to the original question, we want to make products that people love, but we also want to challenge them a little bit in the way that we challenge ourselves to do something different and yet still be field notes-y.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So on that then, Dime Novel, the most recent edition, is another really drastic departure. Yeah. I think maybe in a similar way, like America the Beautiful, because it's a totally different form factor and it looks different and the pages are numbered. But how has the reaction to this one been compared to something like America the Beautiful?

'''Jim Coudal:''' I think we could talk about this in two different ways. First of all, the original reaction was pretty positive about it because it looks pretty sexy in photos and we did an okay job of describing it. But when people started to get them, then the reaction really was good because it's a very tactile edition. There's a lot of small details that you really can't communicate in photography. But I think Dime Novel is a really good example to talk about what we're trying to do at Field Notes. And there's sort of two parts of it. That's where the idea comes from and how it gets translated into a product, especially in regards to production techniques when we're trying to, maybe we'll start there, production techniques we're trying to replicate a process from the past. I mean, a very quick story is where it all came about is I fell down a rabbit hole about these dime novels. I don't know how I ever found it. And I started reading about it and I found a mother load of information. And the story of these two brothers in New York City and the birth basically of the mass market American paperback and genre novel was completely new to me. And I consider myself a nerd about American publishing and design history. And immediately I'm like, Brian, have you ever heard of these things? And Brian's like, no, I never heard this story at all. And we called Aaron. I go, Aaron, surely you know about the dime novels from New York, the orange covers. He's like, no, I never heard about that. And we're like, at that moment, we're like, well, we have to tell the story. Because if us three don't know what it is, not that we're doing it, but if we don't know what it is, then a lot of people don't know what it is. And so we did more and more research and we actually bought one from 1860. And then that presented this whole other thing is how do we translate something from 1860 to 2017 in terms of production and also to a brand whose inspiration is the 1920s? So like the dime novels were 60 years before the farm books that are the basis of the inspiration. And for all of Field Notes, so maybe Brian, you could talk about that. 80 years before Futura. You're talking about our honest appropriation.

'''Brian Bedell:''' We are really interested in how production and how the technology affected the design of a certain time. And I've always been super interested in that. I bore people with this on tours all the time. But if you look at someone designing, say, a 60s poster, they'll look at the superficial aspects of what was done then, the sort of psychedelic type and the colors and maybe do that and copy it. But people don't realize that those decisions were made because they needed to be screen printed in relatively small quantities but distributed. A lot of the type was actually typewriter type stuck on there. And then the display type would have been hand-drawn mostly. But no one ever designing a 60s-looking poster is going to hand-draw a psychedelic type. They're going to use Hobo or some stupid, totally inappropriate typeface to kind of copy that style. So, and I guess, like, going to other, you know, in industrial design, too, I'm into Vespa scooters. And in the last 15 years, there's been 100 retro-looking scooters that came out. And they just have these stupid chrome plastic, you know, scoops and grills and stuff on them that don't do anything. And if you look back at original scooters from the 50s and 60s, you know, those had a purpose and it was very carefully designed to be this perfect form of, or mix of form and function. And these modern ones are just an engine with this plastic body stuck over it with stuff stuck to it to make it look like it's from the 60s. So that's been a big driving force for the design is looking at the production of the time, not doing anything we couldn't do. You know, we might not be able to do it exactly the same way, but we don't want to have, you know, overlapping type or, you know, just crazy things that, you know, you can do on a computer so easily now that were impossible back then.

'''Jim Coudal:''' So that's, that keeps us honest.

'''Brian Bedell:''' And I think even looking at the dime novel, like we were so surprised to see how, how small the type was, how crowded it was, how much they were able to do with the technology of the time. It blew our mind really. Yeah. Still does. Yeah.

'''Jim Coudal:''' But to go to his point, I think this is that we make an honest effort to reproduce the technological limitations that resulted in the original thing. Like, and this is a really interesting example in dime novel is that the original dime novels and they did millions of them were all set by hand with metal type and they were printed on letterpress. And if you look at them, the ink would hit the page with the metal type and make a bit of an impression. Now, ideally we would have printed our dime novel edition on a letterpress, but we didn't have a year and a half to do it. Like, you know, because we make so many of them and that we had just had the idea six weeks before we needed to, or eight weeks before we had to put the whole thing together. So what's the honest way to do that is either you don't put an impression and you just print on it. Or what we did, which is ridiculously complicated, is that we printed the pages at one printer. Then we took the pages to another printer and hit them with a die to make an impression the same as the type so that the final thing would look like it had been printed with a letterpress. And so it's not, we're not cheating. We're actually going out of our way to take an extra step to try to reproduce the effect.

'''Brian Bedell:''' Actually, like you were saying, it's sort of a mistake. Well, right, right. Originally, you see any letterpress printing now really milks that impression just to make it clear that it's letterpress. But back then that was sort of, you would do everything you would do to avoid that. Right. Especially with the dime novels, they're printed on pretty cheap paper. So it wasn't very soft paper. And there's not much of an impression there. But as long as we were, as long as we could go through all that trouble, we've had to make it count.

'''Jim Coudal:''' So anyway, and that is the final dime novel thing, or maybe not, we could talk about dime novel for the rest of the hour too, is that the reason that they existed was in fact a technological change. Up until about 1830 or 40, there was a couple of ways to make a lot of something in printing. One was a newspaper. They would make a lot of newspapers in the day. And that was a big, huge press that was specifically for making newspapers. The other was hardcover books. Those took a long time to print. You put them together. So this guy Adams invented this thing called the power press, which was still pretty big, as big as a car. But at least you could print a bunch of copies quickly. And there is no dime novels from the Beatles brothers in 1860 if there is no Adams power press, because there was no way to do it. So it's sort of interesting. This technological moment made this beautiful piece of consumer design. And so for us, all of this ephemera around it, this is what we love the most, is that we learned all this stuff that we didn't know before we started this project. And hopefully that comes through in our marketing materials and in the documentary film we make and everything else.

'''Brian Bedell:''' Sorry, to go back to the reaction to it, we had blank pages, which we haven't done that many times with the limited editions. But I think back to America the Beautiful, that was the first ruled we did. We had done .graph before that, but most of them were either .graph or .graph. And people were super angry, like, why is this ruled? It's a subscription. I demand my graph paper. And we were like, we never said that. That was your idea of what you were going to get. And sorry, if you don't like it, we've always kind of joked, like, if you don't want it, send it back and we'll send you some graph paper ones. And no one ever follows us up on that.

'''Brian Bedell:''' But that was the same thing with this one. It was blank pages. And people were like, what am I going to do with blank pages? It's like, well, you could do just about anything with them. And if not, there are just as many people that are angry that if they would have had graph pages, we can't please everybody with every edition.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That leads right into my question about the dime novel, is when you hear your story, and what goes into it, and then you see the video, it's almost, it's like, how can you even say anything about, okay, the format's not three and a half by five and a half. Like, those type of, I don't want to call them complaints, but it's a different book. But it's there for a reason. The time and effort you put into it, that kind of eliminates the, oh, well, this isn't my usual field notes that I get.

'''Jim Coudal:''' That won't stop people. Well, but we're sort of resolved with that, you know, because arts and sciences was larger for a reason, and the byline was larger for a reason, and this is larger for a reason. But we do know that people like the standard format very much, and so we tend to do that once a year. Yeah, there's three versions of that reading for you. Yeah, like that size, yeah. And there are other issues as well, but once again, in the greater scheme of things, is it field notesy? Does it relate to American design history? Has it been carefully made? You know, like, those are the ones that are the things that are... It's practically a perfect addition for what field notes is in my book.

'''Brian Bedell:''' And is it keeping us interested? Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And people are buying it like crazy, so some people must like it. Yep. Yep. All right, let's take a quick break. I want to thank our sponsor for this week, which is Squarespace. You can go to squarespace.com. You can sign up for a trial. And if you use the offer code INC at checkout, you will get 10% of your first purchase. You can make your next move with Squarespace. They let you easily create the website that you have for your next idea or project. Maybe you want to create a website to show off your gallery of field notes. We did that. Do you remember when we did that?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' We absolutely did that. Is it still on the web? It is not because I think I stopped updating it. I was somewhere in the 20-something editions. There was a page that kind of had them all in order up until then. I need to put it back up.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You should put it back up. Complete it. Go to the Wayback Machine and check it out. It's because it's very easy to do with Squarespace. They have all of the tools that you need. So they're only one platform. If you want to sell stuff, if you want to have a blog, if you want to have a gallery, a portfolio, if you want to set up a site for your business, Squarespace have got it all. You can get a unique domain name. They have award-winning 24-7 customer support. They have award-winning templates. They win lots of awards at Squarespace because their stuff is that good. There's nothing to install. No patches to worry about. No upgrades needed. They have everything built right there. You can just go and take advantage of what you need. Their plans start at just $12 a month. You can sign up for a trial with no credit card required just by going to Squarespace.com. Then when you decide to sign up, use the offer code INK at checkout. You'll get 10% of your first purchase and show your support for this show. We thank Squarespace for their support. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. And I guess we should also mention at this point to thank our Kickstarter backers as well.