Field Notes

by Richard Quinney

Field Notes received a 2009 Design Award from the Bookbinders' Guild of New York.

"Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all," Ralph Waldo Emerson exclaimed in his essay "Nature." As much as we might look to the heavens, this earth is the only world in which we move and have our being, where we may see into the nature of all things. Our awareness of the everyday world is inspired by the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White in his classic work The Natural History of Selborne. For many naturalists, writers, and poets who followed, the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, the living and the dead, are ambiguous and arbitrary. In the moments when we grasp the essence and wonder of nature, we know that all things are in its domain, that we too are nature. Yet nature is not necessarily benevolent to our human interests. We are subject to the same forces that work in all of nature. Nature is the source of life as well as its destruction as new life is being created. With pen and camera in hand, between town and country, notes are made and a life is lived. One world at a time, here on earth.

130 pp. 6 1/2 x 9 inches

Illustrated

$28 Cloth

ISBN 978-0-9768781-6-2

2008