Photo credit: Robert Occhialini The DDC Stuff Sheath—designed by the fine folks at Draplin Design Co.—is a simple leather sheath that protects your Field Notes notebook and other bits of paper bouncing around in your pocket. As the embossing on the front cover says, the Stuff Sheath is very durable and very, very orange. Sports a single line of stitching along the…
As I've said, you can never really have too many notebooks. These Camp Trip Notebooks from Trails of Escape in particular are great tools for planning and journaling your next outdoors excursion. The cover lets you fill in a trip location and date range, while the inner pages contain gear-packing checklists and pages where you can capture your thoughts during the trip.…
It's been nine months since we first wrote about Nock Co., the pen-and-paper accessories startup co-founded by our friend Brad Dowdy. I won't belabor any childbirth references here (well I guess I just did), but I'm excited to say that their store is finally open for business. If you're like us and partial to nice pens and Field Notes notebooks, Nock Co.…
Here at Tools & Toys, we don't think there is such a thing as having too many notebooks in one's life. Here's another one you should add to your collection (especially if you're an aviation nerd): FLIGHTBOOK. Inspired by the 1956 edition of The Observer's Book of Aircraft, the covers of these graph-paper notebooks contain some neat bits of aviation trivia, while…
Coal Headwear has teamed up with Draplin Design Co. to produce a special, limited-edition Field Notes set that is timed perfectly for both the 4th of July and the World Cup. This beautiful Americana-inspired 3-pack is of the graph paper variety, and will run you $12 + US-only shipping (which was $5 for me).
This season's entry in the Field Notes COLORS lineup is the new "Arts and Sciences" edition. At 4.75" x 7.5", these notebooks are noticeably larger than the standard 3.5" x 5.5" Field Notes. Rather than shipping as a three-pack of the same notebook, this edition contains two distinct models: the wine-colored "Arts" notebook and the dark slate "Sciences" notebook. Each is respectively…
Just when I thought nobody could possibly innovate in the notebook space, along comes a Kickstarter project to prove me wrong. Magnote magnetic notebooks look like simple notebooks on the surface, but their covers and spines are comprised of neodymium magnets. This allows the notebooks to be attached to one another for easy storage, and separated only as needed. Each Magnote is…
The Orée Board 2 is a wireless, super-light, wooden keyboard crafted from a single piece of walnut or maple. It can pair with up to five different devices at the same time via Bluetooth, and its surface is coated with a varnish that protects it from finger oil and liquid spills. After being carved, each board is polished, oil-rubbed, and assembled by…
Editorial, the powerful text editor for iOS, updated to version 1.1 today. It might as well be called 2.0 though, given the sheer number of changes, overhauls, and improvements that went into it. On top of having a redesigned interface for iOS 7, Editorial is now a Universal app so it works on iPhone as well as iPad. Editorial on iPhone is…
The Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover remains one of my favorite iPad accessories. The one I own is practically a part of my iPad at this point, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in using their iPad as a primary writing device. Logitech produced a version of the Ultrathin for iPad Air last Fall, but now there is a new-and-improved edition that…
As the name implies, this poster shows off the beautiful typewriters of famous authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Joyce Carol Oates, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath, Hunter S. Thompson, and more. Perfect for any literary or writing geek to hang in their workspace. $14-$39 on Etsy.
A simple leather cover for Field Notes notebooks. As my friend Patrick Rhone puts it: “Not only a nice place to keep a Field Notes brand notebook but also a handy place to keep some index cards, business cards, and book of stamps.” Not much more to say than that. $45 at Hellbrand Leatherworks.
As much as I love the Cosmonaut stylus, some note-taking situations call for a...finer touch. The Adonit Jot Script — Evernote Edition is about as close as you can get to writing on your iPad with a real pen (something I do not condone). Its mere 1.9mm tip would normally cause issues with iPad detection, but Adonit has solved that problem by…
People have mixed feelings about Comic Sans. "Civilians" love the font for its casual handwritten look, while designers just love to hate it. Graphic designer Craig Rozynski decided he'd had enough of this divide, and designed a new typeface intended to make both camps happy: Comic Neue. In Craig's own words: “The squashed, wonky, and weird glyphs of Comic Sans have been…
Speaking of TextExpander Touch, it's been updated to version 2.5 and sports a new iOS 7 design along with some new features. They've made it much easier to rename and reorder snippet groups, as well as move individual snippets between groups. Groups that are only useful on a Mac can now be disabled for iOS. They've also added some external keyboard shortcuts:…
WriteRight is an app for iPhone and iPad that probably won't replace your favorite iOS text editor (cough Editorial cough), but works nicely as a supplemental writing and editing tool. It analyzes your writing and offers synonyms and antonyms for any highlighted text, and will even show alternative ways to phrase a multi-word selection. It understands gender, number, and conjugation, so its…
Sean McCabe, the guy who designed the awesome 'Influence the World' poster (amongst many other things) has put together a set of video courses to help you become a hand-lettering artist yourself. In these videos, Sean shows you how to craft a hand-lettered composition from start to finish, including lots of tips on technique and style. In the more advanced lessons, he…
William Zinsser's On Writing Well—much like The Elements of Style and Stephen King's On Writing—is one of those books that gets recommended to all writers sooner or later. And for good reason. Zinsser has been in the writing business a loooong time (nearly 70 years, in fact). He's taught classes and workshops, worked as a journalist, and authored nearly 20 books on…
The guys at Field Notes have done it again with the latest in their COLORS lineup, the cover of which is actually made of wood. It's called the Shelterwood Edition. As you can watch in their behind-the-scenes video, they've very thinly sliced up some American cherry wood and bonded it with kraft paper to form each cover. Due to the nature of…
Mike Dudek, the guy who writes about pens over at The Clicky Post, also handcrafts some very nice pen-and-notebook holders. My favorite of the bunch is called 'The Display', because it displays your pens nicely (up to 5) and also holds a few Field Notes notebooks. It's obviously a great item to have in your workspace, but I think it works just…