Draplin’s field of notes will remind you that home is where the past is

“Being a graphic artist, I started looking at everything a little further past what is fashionable,” 41-year-old Draplin says. “I could see all the things I’m supposed to look at as a designer, but then I would look at regular stuff and the ‘undesign’ in that, the beauty in that, and became interested in functional things instead of beautiful things. What I’m interested in, the most common denominator, is really simple stuff” he added in one of his interviews about a project that is inspiring to the root of it. So a little lesson in history. At the turn of the 20th century pocket-sized memo books were given out by all sorts of companies as promotional items. Fertilizer companies, banks, seed companies, fence and twine manufacturers, and even organizations were investing design and money to these pocket ledgers with covers varied based on what was being advertised. Most of these little treasures included space for notes or records, charts, graphs et al.

Traveling across the USA, Aaron Draplin started hunting memo books at antique malls and yard sales to pick up memo books. With a collection of more than 1,000 memo books dating from the late 1880s to the mid-1980s he decided, along with Jim Coudal to scan these rare booklets, to create a digital archive of the collection for everyone who seeks inspire to the past. “Part of my quest to scan these little books is to preserve something from the American landscape that will disappear forever once it’s gone,” he says. His passion led eventually to a business venture in the form of National Crop Edition books. These relics of typography and old design can be found here, a reminder that it is our duty to rescue the lost great design in all its innocent glory.