Most schemes to compress the topology of a surface mesh have been developed for the lowest common denominator: triangulated meshes. We propose a scheme that handlesthe topology of arbitrary polygon meshes. It encodes meshes directly in their polygonal representation and extends to capture face groupings in a natural way. Avoiding the triangulation step we reduce the storage costs for typical polygon models that have group structures and property data. CR Categories: I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling—surface, solid, and object representations;