Tomorrow I have to deliver an edition of 40 and I've been sitting with them spread across the floor since Tuesday, all of them technically identical, all of them slightly not, and I genuinely cannot tell you which one is the print. There's a smudge on number 17 where the paper slipped, and honestly it's the best thing in the edition, and I'm going to have to pull it because the whole point of an edition is that the 17th is the same as the 3rd.

This is the thing I keep coming back to and it never resolves. I make multiples for a living, I believe in the multiple, I teach the multiple, and every time I finish an edition I want to keep the ugly one. The mistake is the only one that's mine. The other 39 belong to the plate.

There's a corner of the studio where I stack the rejects, and it's grown into the more interesting pile. I should probably stop calling it the reject pile.

I don't have a clean resolution for this. I just want to know if the rest of you who print feel it too, or if I'm romanticizing a slipped sheet of Somerset because I have deadline nerves and no sleep.