One tired evening, Field Notes co-founder Aaron Draplin bought an obsolete 1950s-era road sign from the Sunset Motel in Missouri, the kind that evokes that of an all-American diner with its carefully paired typefaces enclosed in two upside-down trapezoids. Three days later, Draplin was in Sedalia and saw the local sign company remove the 28-foot sign piece by piece.

Curious what the replacement would be, the designer paid the motel staff a visit. Inside, a folder revealed a $1,500 invoice and an image of the new sign: Sunset Motel printed in Blibo Bold in a bright orange gradient inside a thick square border. Stripped of its charm and history, the motel would now appear to be no more than a cheap roadside motel. It was everything Draplin dislikes in design: lacking careful consideration and history.

Field Notes is like that original retro road sign. In form and function, these signature memo books offer a nostalgic combination of type, color, and utilitarian sensibility that find their origins in the back pockets of the American farmer.

Which brings us to Draplin’s first excursion west, in 1993, when he first began collecting pocket-size agricultural memo books from antique malls and thrift stores, sowing the seeds for the Field Notes brand. Distributed to farmers by agricultural companies in the mid-1900s, the books contain charts and calendars, and some of them handwritten notes and calculations, traces of the untold stories of their anonymous owners. To date, Draplin has collected hundreds of these memo books, which were uploaded to a web archive in tandem with the 2012 Field Notes National Crop Edition.

This spring, Field Notes brings their national pride up a notch with the 2013 collection, America the Beautiful. The assortment, which costs $9.95 for a three-pack, includes limited-edition versions of the Field Notes signature memo pad, each printed with over-saturated images of quintessential American landscapes: “Spacious Skies,” “Mountain Majesty” and “Amber Waves of Grain.” Printed on yellow paper with an out-of-use 100-line screen, these books epitomize the homegrown American values that make Field Notes what it is: homegrown, sturdy and cheerfully nostalgic.