WINTER 2016 QUARTERLY EDITION Black Ice Three 48-Page Memo Books

OUR 33RD QUARTERLY EDITION

Eternal, Shiny and Chrome

It’s mid-November here at Field Notes Midwest HQ. It was nearly 70°F a couple days ago, but now the temperature has dropped into the twenties. We’ve seen our first flurries, frost covers the ground, and Black Ice is here. Our 33rd Quarterly Edition for Winter 2016 is available now.

If you follow our exploits, you know that we love to explore materials, inks, printing processes and other special effects with our Quarterly Editions. At first glance, you’ll see we’ve taken foil stamping to an extreme. We’ve stamped Sappi’s premium McCoy 100# cover stock with a silvery-black metallic foil, covering the whole book, everything but the spine (video). That portion features a stripe of vibrant orange ink with a soft-touch varnish. The cover text is embossed, giving the whole book a retro-futuristic machine feel.

But the biggest difference between Black Ice and our usual Field Notes is a bit less obvious if you don’t look closely. This is our first pocket memo book without staples! The books are PUR-bound (video), using an advanced polyurethane adhesive that’s both stronger and more flexible than regular perfect binding. We’ve been wanting to try out PUR binding for a while and this paper/color combination seemed like a perfect fit.

Inside, you’ll find “Bright White” Finch Fine Smooth 70# text paper, a brighter-white version of the paper found (and beloved) in our “America the Beautiful” limited edition. It’s ruled in “Frost Gray” with a double-rule of “DDC Orange” up top.

It all turned out to be a very complicated printing process, involving a lot of testing, lots of steps, many press checks and some serious challenges for our printers. In the end, they came through and really nailed it. These books look simply amazing.

WRAPPING UP A SLICK PRESENTATION

But that’s not all! With the holidays approaching, we figured you might want to share these great new Field Notes with friends and loved ones, so we’re including an 11×11" sheet of FNC-33b “Gift Concealment Wrap” and an FNC-33c “Adhesive Gift Label” with every 3-Pack of Black Ice that is bought through our site, shop, or is part of a Year-Long subscription. The wrapping paper (video) features a handsome 3-color pattern (orange, dark gray, and metallic silver) designed by Aaron Draplin. It complements Black Ice perfectly, but if you decide you can’t part with your 3-Pack, we suppose you could use it to wrap a lesser gift, like a diamond ring or something.