“It’s sort of interesting to be steeped in an environment and reading something related to it,” proprietor Jim Coudal says. “Sometimes it’s just the opposite; sometimes it’s interesting to read about the Civil War in Jamaica.”It may seem strange that a design company is one of Chicago’s more inventive online literary presences, but Coudal says he’s always been interested in writing, and Kevin Guilfoile was one of the original partners before his novel, Cast of Shadows, became a hit.

Coudal and his staff put out the word to writer friends, and writer friends of friends, asking them to recount a memorable time they’d read a book while away from home. Some of the stories are quite literally summer reading tales, like Guilfoile’s account of paging through Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—James Agee’s book about impoverished white sharecroppers in the South­­—while on spring break in a rented beach condo. Others describe shorter trips, like the George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, In Persuasion Nation) contribution about discovering the short stories of Stuart Dybek at the Harold Washington Library.

Other contributors include Onion film writer Keith Phipps, I’m Not the New Me author Wendy McClure, and New Yorker editor Ben Greeman. It’s the third year Coudal Partners has put such a collection together, but it’s the first time they’ve tried to sell it.

“It was never our intention that this would be a self-liquidating proposal,” says Coudal. “Like most things we do at Coudal, we’re doing nothing but following our whims to their logical or illogical conclusion.”

It’s true. Field-Tested Books, which Coudal says has sold “hundreds,” is just another example of how the firm functions not only as a design and advertising consultancy, but as a symposium for ideas. Coudal estimates that half of the company’s revenue comes from designing projects for clients (the Blackhawks are one of their bigger tickets), and the other half from self-generated projects, such as short films they shoot with help from sponsors, or their high-end CD and DVD packaging product, Jewelboxing.

“We basically think that the design-for-hire business model is broken,” says Coudal. “We wanted to take greater control over the creative we produce. No one’s getting richer, but we’re happy.”

Another project, Verse by Voice, was a poetry meme that allowed anyone to call a phone number and read his or her favorite short poem into the voice mail. It was a popular and neat game that attracted a fair amount of attention, including a contribution from British novelist Zadie Smith (“That was really out of the blue,” Coudal says).

“I don’t know if we’re literary, but we’re certainly writerly,” Coudal says. “If you’re actually looking for a serious book to read this summer, you’d do better with FTB than you would a major newspaper’s list of the best summer thrillers.”

Field-Tested Books is available at www.coudal.com/ftb.