I'm printing a four-plate etching this week, hard ground line over aquatint, Charbonnel black, on this Somerset that's been in the drawer since a residency in 2021 and has gone slightly cockled at the edges. I pulled twelve proofs Sunday. On the first nine the ink flaked off the shoulder of the plate where the ground got scratched too thin, a little starburst of grey dust sitting on top of the image like ash.

By proof ten the plate had worn in and it stopped. Clean.

So I have nine with the flake and three without, and I've spent two days now trying to decide which one the edition is. The obvious answer is the clean one, that's what the plate does when it's properly bitten and properly inked. But the flake is the only mark in the whole thing that isn't mine. It's the part that happened.

There's a thing I keep coming back to, that a print is supposed to be the same every time, that's the promise. And here is a small accident that makes nine of them not the same, and my first instinct was to call the nine the real ones and the three the mistakes, which is backwards and also feels true.

I know somebody is going to tell me to just re-bite the plate and print it properly. I probably will. But I wanted to say it out loud first, because the moment I fix it, the version I care about stops existing, and I'm not sure I've decided that's fine.

Anyway. If anyone has a rule for this, like a cutoff for how much unplanned mark you're willing to certify as the print, I want to hear it. Mine keeps moving.