When Field Notes released their Chicago Edition pocket notebooks in 2016, they weren’t marketed as the first in a series. Because the company is based in Chicago, it seemed more like something the Field Notes employees made as a fun little side-project. But fast forward a year, and now we have the Portland Edition, which is the second in what Field Notes is now referring to as the “Hometown Series.”

This Portland edition, like the Chicago edition before it, uses the same 80# cover stock and 50# graph-lined inner-paper as the standard Kraft edition. The only significant difference is that these notebooks have Portland’s municipal flag printed on the cover, adjusted so that the four-pointed star is centered underneath the Field Notes logo.

Portland has a really great flag design, so I like these pocket notebooks for that reason alone. But they’d mainly be great for anyone who likes the standard Kraft Field Notes, yet wants something a little more interesting than the “packing paper” brown cover. So far, the notebooks in this Hometown Series aren’t “limited” and don’t cost any more than standard Field Notes. So even for someone with no personal connection to Portland, they still might be worth buying over the Kraft books. And for any proud Portlanders (or Portlandians?), these notebooks are literally made for you.

Additional Notes

• Of the 30 “Practical Applications” listed in the notebooks’ inside-back cover, my favorites are the following: “09. Powell’s Books Building Maps”; “27. Food Trucks Visited”; and “30. Burnside Stoplight Patterns.”
• The reasons these are #2 in the new Field Notes Hometown Series? Aaron Draplin, creator of the Field Notes brand, lives in Portland.
• The Field Notes website links to a survey of vexillologists, and they’ve ranked Portland’s flag as the 7th best municipal flag in the U.S. That’s pretty good. But I’m hoping that the next Hometown edition uses the flag from Phoenix, AZ. That is one awesome flag.