FNC-17 marks the start of Field Note's fifth year of their Quarterly Editions. In that time, they've explored a wide variety of papers, colors, and printing techniques, but with this new Expedition edition, for the first time, they've actually expanded the type of paper used in their notebooks.

Aesthetically, you’ll find an all-new design with plenty to like: a hi-visibility “Antarctic Survey Orange” front cover and “Polar Night Black” back cover, with a subtle varnish effect featuring a topographic map of Antarctica. The body pages feature their popular dot-graph paper printed in light gray.

But the real innovation here is the paper. It’s maybe not even fair to call it paper. The whole book is printed on Yupo Synthetic paper, an amazing tearproof and waterproof paper extruded from polypropylene pellets in Chesapeake, Virginia. Field Notes could go on and on about their new notebooks’ durability and incredible properties (especially in concert with the new Space Pen, FN-19), and they will, in this series of 12 (reasonably) scientific tests:

TEST 1: WATERPROOF
TEST 2: VISIBILITY
TEST 3: WIND RESISTANCE
TEST 4: BALLISTICS
TEST 5: VACUUM
TEST 6: TENSILE STRENGTH
TEST 7: COMPRESSION
TEST 8: ACID RESISTANCE
TEST 9: FLAME RESISTANCE
TEST 10: EXTREME TEMPERATURE
TEST 11: ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES
TEST 12: ELECTRICAL RESISTANCE

Months of development and testing were required to get these books just right, and they'd like to thank Yupo for their extensive support, as well as the great printers and ink technicians that pitched in to help.

• Proudly printed by the good people of eDOC Communications, Mount Prospect, Ill.

• Cover: waterproof/tearproof Yupo Synthetic 74#C, with thick, brute force applications of “Hi-Visibility Orange” and “Low-Visibility Black” soy-based Saphira inks and a tinted spot varnish.
• Innards: waterproof/tearproof Yupo Synthetic 57#T with a 1-color application of “Cartographer’s Gray” soy-based Saphira ink. (Use pencil/ballpoint pen for best results.)
• Cover and innards printed on a Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 105 40" 6-color printing press.
• Bound by a Harris Bookbinder 6-pocket saddle stitcher with cover feeder, with appreciation to Samuel Slocum, George W. McGill, and William J. Brown, the “Founding Fathers of the Staple.”
• Corners rounded to 3/8" (9.5mm) by a Challenge DCM round-corner machine.
• Dot-graph grid: 3/16" × 3/16" (4.7mm × 4.7mm).
• Memo book dimensions are 3-1/2" × 5-1/2" (8.9cm × 13.9cm).
• FIELD NOTES uses only the Futura typeface family (Paul Renner, 1927) in its materials.
• All FIELD NOTES memo books are printed and manufactured in the U.S.A.