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I've been selling small edition screenprints through Instagram and my site for about a year now. Nothing huge, maybe 15-20 pieces a month. A few weeks ago I started slipping in a free risograph print with each order, just something I'd already made, an extra, no mention of it in the listing. I thought it would be a nice gesture. What I didn't expect is that people started posting the risograph more than the thing they paid for. Like, photographing it on their wall, tagging me, asking if it's for sale separately. The free thing became the thing they wanted. It's making me rethink how I present the work. People love feeling like they discovered something, even if you deliberately put it there. There's something about the "bonus" object that reads as more authentic than the main one, probably because it feels less like a transaction. I don't know, maybe this is just a thing everyone in product already knows. But coming from a fine art background where you never give anything away because it devalues the work, it's messing with my head a little.

A gallery in Leipzig asked me for a small edition of risograph prints for their holiday market, 50 copies, two colors, A3. I said €250 because I thought riso was cheap to produce and I'd breeze through it. I forgot to account for the test prints, the misregistration on the first 15, the fact that I had to reorder one of the inks mid-run, and the two full days I spent separating the layers because the files the gallery sent were trash. Total cost of materials plus my time: somewhere around €17 an hour. For printmaking. That's less than I paid for the paper. I keep doing this thing where I price the work as if the thinking part is free. As if the years of knowing how to troubleshoot a bad registration or choose paper that won't ghost count for nothing. I just factor materials and a small gesture toward labour and call it done. I'm raising the next edition to €600 and I already feel like I'm being greedy. Which is insane, because €600 for 50 prints, two-color, A3, with original art, that's €12 a print. That's nothing. But the feeling is there anyway.

My brother's girlfriend works at a small museum in Verona, the kind with a decent contemporary collection and a shop that tries. She asked if I'd do an edition of risograph prints for them, small run, 50 copies. I said yes because family, because I liked the museum, because I told myself it was exposure with a little money attached. I charged €80 per print. My cost per print was about €4 in materials, so I felt fine about it. Generous even. I signed and numbered them, packed them myself, paid for shipping. She sent me a photo yesterday. They're on the shelf at €180. With a little acrylic display stand I didn't know about. And I sat with it. I get it, the museum has overhead, the shop has margins, the frame around the print is worth something. But I did the math on my time and it came out to something like €12 an hour including the design work. The museum is making a 125% markup on my labor and I'm the one who did everything but put it on the shelf. I don't know what the right number would have been. €120? €150? I'm scared to ask for that because I'm not a name yet and I keep thinking, what if they just say no and I lose the connection? But also, what's the connection worth if it's structured like this?

Third time this week my Riso has eaten a master and crumpled it into a little accordion. I know it's probably the paper moisture or the master tension or whatever, but I've cleaned the drum twice, adjusted the feed, and it still decides to destroy every tenth print like it's personal. The worst part is the sound. That high-pitched mechanical scream when it jams. My studio mate in the next room doesn't even ask anymore, she just hears the noise and goes "again?" through the wall. I know this machine is supposed to be this beautiful imperfect tool and the flaws are part of the charm. I don't want charm. I want fifty zines by Friday and this thing is testing my commitment to the multiple as a concept.

Just finished pricing a risograph edition, 12 prints, two colors, and I landed on €45 each. The math is fine if you count paper, ink, the masters, the studio time. But I didn't count my time in it at all. I never do. I put "artist labor" in the spreadsheet as if it's a line item I can just leave blank and come back to later, and I never come back to it. It's a weird thing with editioned work specifically. With a single painting I can at least pretend the hours are the point. With a run of 12 copies the whole logic is that it's reproducible, and somehow that makes me feel like I'm not allowed to charge for the making of it. Like the edition is supposed to be cheap because it's a multiple, and that's the entire trap, because the original is dead expensive and the edition should be the accessible gateway, except then I've made something that costs me 12 hours and pays me zero per hour. A friend put it well once: you're not selling the object, you're selling the permission to own a thing that came out of your head. The paper is nearly free. I should try actually believing that before the next one.