About a thousand years ago, Saturday Night Live had a segment on Weekend Update where Gary Kroeger complained about the disease of spot bleeding. The bit wasn’t that funny because it was a joke you could see coming from miles away.

Spot bleeding does, however, describe the paper in the Field Notes Shenandoah limited edition.

Out of the box the Shenandoah is one of the best looking editions in a long time. The covers are different shades of green and are bound together with a birch veneer belly band which, despite being 90% useless, still looks pretty cool. Although I like the Two Rivers and Workshop Companion editions, it’s nice to see a simple cover, which is more in the Field Notes tradition.

The Field Notes Shenandoah edition.

Each cover is dedicated to a different tree in the Shenandoah Valley and includes drawings of their leaves and short descriptions of the trees. Each has a duplex covers (two different colored papers fused together to form one thick piece) with gives them different colors inside the covers.

The paper is 60#T Finch Opaque “Bright White” paper with a 3/16″ Appalachian Moss light green graph. Unfortunately, the paper is not particularly fountain pen friendly, but in an odd way.

The paper bleeds a lot, especially when I try to break it, but the rest of the time it spot bleeds.

The back side of the back page after I made it bleed. Even here it is mostly bleeding in spots.

The spot bleeding under the next day’s food log. You can also see how the grid cuts through the lines in the ink.

For the most part, the bleeding, as always, doesn’t bother me. I’m more annoyed by the grid pattern which messes up the way the ink flows on the page. I would love to see a Field Notes limited edition that just had blank pages inside.

I resubscribed to the limited editions and plan to give away more copies this year. The Shenandoah is a good gateway drug, er, starter edition, especially for those who haven’t yet learned the power of the dark side (fountain pens).