Field Notes + Ingersoll Notebook Review

Field Notes + Ingersoll

The newest Field Notes brand collaboration is with Ingersoll, a watch company that was once American, now owned by a British arm of a Chinese company. They're most famous for the Mickey Mouse watches and the "Dollar Watch", which was, at the time, a watch you could afford for one day's pay. Now, of course, they're an upscale-ish brand with watches in the $400-$700 range, with names like "The New Haven" and "The Michigan". You'll forgive me if I haven't heard of their watches before, I just don't hang with that crowd. I have an Army green Timex that does just fine. And I never wear it: I spend most of my day at a keyboard and can't have things on my wrist. If I were to review their watches just by looking at their website, I'd say to keep your money stateside and buy a Shinola.

But we're here to talk about pocket notebooks, right? As far as brand collaborations go, this one is fairly standard. The weights of all the paper and cover are the same as standard Kraft. The covers are essentially a reverse of the standard Kraft color scheme, with the same "Dachshund Nose" ink brute-forced onto "Packing Brown Wrap" 80# cover stock. The Practical Applications are the same as a standard book.

There are a few cool things about it. The white staples play off the black cover nicely. The Ingersoll logo is pressed on the back cover with a white gloss foil to match the staples. The belly band is a nice touch, too. Belly bands with a photograph aren't super common with Field Notes, and this one has a picture of a hairy wrist with an Ingersoll watch on it.

The paper inside is the standard 60# "Bright White" from French Paper. But these aren't graph: you get 2 lined and 1 blank. Readers will know my preference for lined notebooks, so I'm happy to see them. I dunno about the one blank though. Seems to me this is kind of weird. They did the same with the covers of the LL Bean "Bean Boots" back in January, 2 of one kind, 1 of another. I wonder if this was a preference from Ingersoll.

Pictured belly band.

Giant chunk taken out of some pages and left on others.

Two lined and one blank.

With this paper weight, the covers aren't blown out at the seams this time around. I did, however, get one of the worst corner-rounds I've ever seen. There is a huge chunk out of some of the pages and the back 20% have a big tab of extra paper that didn't get sheared off. I think the Challenge SCM corner-rounder needs to be re-calibrated, sharpened, and drug-tested.

Video Review.

There's not much else to say about these books. They are essentially branded kraft books with the ink reversed and the brand name stamped on the back. At $15 per pack, these are higher than most of the brand collaborations, but luckily those of us in the USA didn't get stuck with shipping from the UK. They're nice to look at, but I wouldn't recommend them unless you are a serious collector. I wish I had seen something like this review before I purchased them, because I wouldn't have bought them myself.

Available from Ingersoll, $15.