Press & Cord Bindery
Hudson, New York — binding since 1996. The No. 07 Field Notebooks: oxblood, forest green, and kraft, sewn in signatures.
The bindery is the youngest shop on the roster and the fastest by a comic margin — two weeks door to door, two hundred sets a week when the presses are rolling. On a roster where one workshop measures its history in centuries, Press & Cord measures its runs in fortnights and finds the rest of us slow.
Speed is not the point, though; the sewing is. Every field notebook is stitched in signatures, never glued, because a glued spine cracks in the cold and a notebook that will not lie flat on a knee is a notebook that stays in the pack. The covers are waxed kraft in the catalog's three colors, and the paper takes pencil in the rain — tested, per tradition, on the loading dock in actual rain.
It is also the only workshop founded by people who first owned the product: the binders carried other people's notebooks up other people's mountains for a decade, disliked them professionally, and came home to do something about it.
At the bench this quarter
Run 21 — four hundred sets — is queued for a two-week run in August. Run 20 arrived at Crosby Street in June and is going fast.