I priced a hare print at €45 for six years and did the sums last week
Sat down with the notebook after the Christmas market and did the actual sums on my hare print. The one everyone buys, the small one, 12 x 16cm on Japanese paper, edition of 60. I've had it at €45 since about 2018 and I was fierce pleased with myself for it.
Here's the thing. Four hours carving, give or take, and that's before I count the lino at €9 a sheet, the paper at roughly €2.20 a pull once I've binned the bad ones, ink, and the fact that I wrecked two blocks getting the registration right. Then the printing itself, which is the bit nobody ever counts. 60 pulls, drying between each colour, and I lose about a fifth of them to smudges and uneven pressure because I'm doing it on the kitchen table with a wooden spoon and a bar of soap, not a press.
Worked out at €11 an hour. Eleven. I'd want more than that to stand in the rain holding a sign.
The mental bit is I'm not even annoyed at the buyers. They'd pay more, half of them. It's me that set the price and then kept trotting it out at markets like a fella doing a favour to the world. Raised it to €65 last week for the last of the edition and sold four in an afternoon and nobody so much as blinked. One woman said it was great value, which near killed me.
So now I'm wondering what else I've been doing at 2018 money. The heron's probably worse. I'd say the heron's definitely worse.
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The printing being invisible is the oldest problem in the trade. In painting we have a version of it: people think the price lives in the hours at the easel, and they never count the ten years it took to make the hands that hold the brush. With an edition it's worse, because the buyer sees "60 of them" and their brain divides by sixty without dividing the labour.
I'll be honest though, part of me thinks the €45 hare did its job. It got your work into houses that will never buy the big pieces, and some of those people come back later. The mistake isn't the low price, it's leaving it there for six years while the lino and the paper went up. Raise it now, keep one small thing affordable if you want, but don't apologise for the arithmetic. The sums aren't the enemy. The silence about them is.
the ten years in the hands bit is right but i'd push back a little on the low price doing its job. cheap work follows you around. i had a run of small things i let go cheap early on and the people who bought them are the ones who still, years later, want the same price on everything else. the ones who came back and bought real work came back because they liked the work, not because they got a deal first.
that's a fair push and I'll take it. I was thinking of it as "the price gets people in the door" but you're right that the door it opens is the wrong one, and it's near impossible to close after. I've a lad who bought two of the small ones off me in 2019 for thirty quid each and he still opens every conversation with "any chance of the old rate." sure at this stage he's nearly a fixture.
the ones who came back for the big framed heron never mentioned the price once, they just wanted the thing. that's the tell, isn't it. they were never buying a bargain, they were buying the work, and the bargain was only ever my own nerves talking.
The ten years in the hands, that's the one. Nobody ever prices the hands, they price the afternoon. And you're right about the dividing by sixty, I've had men do it out loud at a market stall, "so that's nearly a euro a hare," as if the other fifty-nine printed themselves while I had the tea.
But you've put your finger on the bit that's been nagging me since I did the sums. The €45 hare did do its job, I won't argue that, half the people who bought the big heron off me first met me through the wee hare. So the mistake isn't the price, you're dead right, it's the leaving it there. Six years is a long time to be standing still while the lino goes up and the paper goes up and I get marginally better at the carving. It's not the cheap hare that's the problem, it's that I never once sat down and asked what it should be now.
So I'm doing a new edition in the spring, same hare, different block, and it's going out at €75 and I'll say why on the label. If people want the old price they can have the old print. Fair's fair.