I have not purchased any Field Notes notebooks, but I appreciate their clear attention to detail - from their varied seasonal designs to their short promotional films.
Take the above film, for example. Made for the release of the "Shenandoah" quarterly edition, it's a simple narration over a montage of footage from the mountains of Virginia, set to music. Simple yet beautiful.
The narration is taken from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781-82 and published in English in 1787. Here's the quote:
The first glance of this scene hurries our senses into the opinion, that this earth has been created in time, that the mountains were formed first, that the rivers began to flow afterwards, that in this place particularly they have been dammed up by the Blue ridge of mountains, and have formed an ocean which filled the whole valley; that continuing to rise they have at length broken over at this spot, and have torn the mountain down from its summit to its base. The piles of rock on each hand, but particularly on the Shenandoah, the evident marks of their disrupture and avulsion from their beds by the most powerful agents of nature, corroborate the impression. But the distant finishing which nature has given to the picture is of a very different character. It is a true contrast to the fore-ground. It is as placid and delightful, as that is wild and tremendous. For the mountain being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach and participate of the calm below.
I know it's advertising, and advertising is supposed to get you to buy stuff. And the stuff you're buying isn't always what you need, or even all that great quality.
But sometimes it is. And sometimes you need advertisment to tell you what you're missing and that the people making that stuff care about it and that you should buy it if you want people to care about what they make.
Of course, that's how advertising is supposed to work. I think I might buy some Field Notes after all.
