Editing The Pen Addict 33/transcript (section)

== Field Notes Blog ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, I got an email. I'm pretty sure it was back in the summer or early fall about, hey, I see you got, you know, some Field Notes in your Flickr stream. You know, I'm collecting. I'm trying to collect something from every – I'm trying to collect, you know, every release that they've ever had. And I see you've got these grass-stained green ones. And would you be willing to part with them? I was like, is this spam? Or is – you know, where is this coming from? You know, it was really unexpected kind of out of the blue. So, honestly, I just kind of – I pretty much kind of blew them off. You know, I was like, you know, yeah, I've got an extra three-pack. But, you know, I'm not looking at – I'm going to keep them, basically. It's like, okay, well, if you change your mind, let me know. I was like, okay, fine. And so a few weeks later, he actually came back with like a hard number. I was like, hey, you have a sealed three-pack of grass-stained green field notes, right? I'm like, yeah. He says, would you take $50 for it?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. I was like, huh? And I turned it down because, you know, that's – I don't want to sell them. I'm not – it's not a money thing. You know, I'm not trying to make you profit off these. It's my favorite. I enjoy them the most. I don't want to sell them. But I thought, you know, $50 for a pack of these, that's pretty steep. And, I mean, if I would have said, yeah, I mean, he wouldn't have blinked. I would have had, you know, $50 on PayPal heading my way or whatever. I was like, okay, this is interesting. So then I started digging. And, you know, I – you know, like we can all kind of stalk each other on the internet. So it's turned out I've talked to this guy a bunch. His name is Sandy McDonald on Twitter. I don't know his Twitter handle right off the top of my head. But he's a super nice guy. And we've talked. I was like, so you're collecting these? And, you know, I started talking to him like, what are you doing? He's like, you know, I'm trying to get, you know, something from every release. You know, there's – I missed a bunch at the beginning, you know, kind of like I did, you know, the Butcher Oranges, Butcher Blues, a lot of the early release ones. And he said, I'm going – I'm tracking down people and, you know, I'm trying to fill out my collection. And he's like, you know, and I've got – you know, there's some friends of mine on Twitter. They're doing the same thing. And then I started getting emails from these other people. Like Sandy struck out with me. Then I started getting email from other people like, hey, I see you have these field notes that do you want to sell? This one and this one and this one. I'm like, no, I don't want to sell any of them. And it was just the damnedest thing because it happened all at one time. I was just getting bombarded with emails of wanting to sell, sell, sell, sell. And I'm like, I didn't realize there was such a collectability aspect to all these releases. So, you know, I think Sandy, you know, he ended up getting – I think he's got all the regular releases and, you know, all of his friends. They've been able to track all these things down and I didn't get involved in, you know, like the ones I'm missing. I didn't really get involved in trying to track down those. But on top of all these color subscriptions, what's happened is Field Notes has also done promotional additions for conferences, for fundraisers, for different businesses, different meetings. And that has become really another area where a lot of these collectors are going. And that's a place that I don't think a lot of fans of Field Notes know that they're doing. So I sent you a link. You can see a guy, the signalnoise.com. What's his name? I'm blanking here.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I've got it in front of me. His name is –

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Jamie.

'''Myke Hurley:''' His name is – Oh, he says but then can't find it. I literally just saw it but now can't find it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I know. I'm sorry. It's Jamie or James – I'm blanking. James White. James White.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Anyway, so he runs a blog.signalnoise.com. Well, within his blog, he's got a page just called Field Notes and it's called My Collection Checklist. And this is a really cool page that you all need to go to the show notes to check out this link because up at the top, he kind of goes in order. You know, Butcher Orange. Got it. Butcher Extra Blue. Got it. Grass Stained Green. Got it. On and on and on. All the regular releases. He's got them all. Then you scroll down to the bottom and then you start seeing all these special additions. And then that's when your mind really gets blown. It's like people that collect these, they're going to all these vendors and all these other places to get this stuff. There's some that are pretty mainstream that anyone can get like J.Crew Special Edition. I went and looked last night. They're on the website right now. They're like $15 a three-pack. I passed on that. I didn't need that. Actually, there's a Threadless Special Edition that I happened to order like two years ago when they were on Threadless. That's when I was shopping on Threadless a bunch and I happened to see those pop up. I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. I didn't even think about it at the time. This was some kind of random release. So I've got some Threadless Special Editions here. I saw our friend Dan Benjamin. There was a photo of him around the time of the XOXO Fest. There's a purple field notes, which is really sweet. I like the purple color, which is Aaron Draplin's blog. Sometimes purple is his least favorite color. He hates these more than anything. But there's a picture of Dan walking down the hall at XOXO Fest with probably just looking at the size of the stack. Just from memory, I don't have it in front of me. He probably had 10 three-packs of these. So they're handing these out at conferences, and it's creating this aftermarket of these Special Edition field notes. And you look on James' site. There's Levi's Special Edition. There's some from Tatli, which is the dry transfer tattoo place.