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A gallery in Berlin that I won't name wants three of my etchings for a small group show in spring, and asked for the price list. I sent it. Three plates, aquatint, edition of 18, 780 euros unframed. The reply came back the same afternoon. Could I do 390, because "prints are multiples, so the price should reflect that." I have been chewing on this for two days and not because I'm insulted. Because the logic is wrong in a way that's interesting. The multiple is exactly the reason the price is what it is. Eighteen people can own this thing, which means each one of them is not paying for the whole of the work. The plate, the proofing, the four days of biting and scraping and failing, the two states I threw away, the paper I ruined on the third run: all of that is divided across eighteen. If I'd made a single unique drawing on that same paper I would be asking four times more and nobody at that gallery would blink. So the argument isn't that the multiple makes it cheap. It's that the multiple makes it copyable, and somewhere in the gallery's head a copy is worth less than an original. Which is the oldest idea in the medium and also the one I've built my whole practice against. Walter Benjamin would have a field day. Actually he'd probably be very polite about it and then say something devastating. What I want to know is whether I'm being naive. I could say no to 390 and lose the show, or say yes and quietly agree that eighteen is a discount rather than a structure. I said I'd think about it. I don't want to think about it, I want to know what the rest of you do when the person across the table is using the medium against you. Meanwhile I've got a stack of proofs on the drying rack that I can't look at without doing sums in my head.

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.

So my first real gallery yes came from a space that, I'm fairly sure, had never shown a print in its life. There was a plate mark on one of my pieces and the director asked, genuinely curious, why I'd "damaged the paper there." I explained intaglio for maybe ten minutes. He nodded a lot. I still said yes. The show was fine, the work was fine, but what I remember is that the person selling my multiples could not explain how a multiple works to a buyer. Which for my work specifically is a bit of a problem, since the whole point is the reproduction. So I want to know: how much did the first gallery that took you on actually understand your medium? Did they get it, did you have to teach them, or did you decide it didn't matter as long as they had wall space and a mailing list? I still go back and forth about which of those is the honest answer.

The zine is 24 pages, two colours, riso, edition of 150. I said 45 euro to the curator because it felt like a nice round number and I wanted the show to happen. Then I did the maths on the actual printing: masters, the paper, the fact that I reprinted nine pages because the registration drifted, the hours folding and stapling. Somewhere between 7 and 8 euro an hour. Here is what I keep circling back to. In printmaking the price of the object and the price of the work have almost nothing to do with each other, and I don't know which one I'm supposed to be charging for. 45 euro is roughly what a print costs. It is nowhere near what a print costs. The edition is the whole point, the multiple, the fact that the same image exists 150 times, and the market reads that as "so it should be cheap." I made the thing more available and it made me worth less. There's a logic there and I hate it. I'm not asking what to charge. I know I underpriced it, that's not the interesting part. I'm asking whether anyone has actually solved this for multiples, or whether we all just quietly subsidise the idea.

Found out last week that the gallery I show with in Berlin takes 50% on editions. Not prints sold through them, editions. I knew the percentage when I signed, I just never did the math on what it meant for the small riso multiples that sell for €80. So the collector pays €80, I get €40, and after paper, ink, the screen, the riso drum wear if I bother to count it, packing, and the trip to drop them off, I'm maybe at €25 a piece. Four hours of editioning to sell four of them and I've made what I'd get for one hour of teaching. The stupid part is I keep pricing as if the gallery cut doesn't exist. I know I should raise the retail price but I'm scared the small multiples stop selling because they're my only "affordable" entry point. So instead I just quietly resent it every time I drop off a batch. I think I need to actually sit down and decide: do I raise the editions to €100 and lose some buyers, or do I stop pretending the gallery is worth it for the small stuff and keep selling those direct? The gallery does bring me the serious collectors, the ones who buy the big etchings. But I can't keep eating the cost on the entry-level work just to feel like I have a foot in the door. Has anyone else had the moment where they did the real math on a gallery split and realized the "foot in the door" was basically them paying for the privilege?

I spent two days this week trying to keep an edition consistent and I hate every single print. The registration is perfect, the ink density is the same, the paper behaved. And they're dead. Completely dead on the page. I think I've been doing this long enough that I should know better. But there's something about the discipline of the edition, the obsessive checking, that kills the life out of the work. The prints that always end up in the shows are the ones I pull a little too fast, when the squeegee angle drifts, when I stop thinking and just move. I lined the dead ones up on the floor this morning. Thirty-two perfect, identical, worthless little objects. It should be the opposite. The multiple is supposed to be about the copy being alive in its own way, not a Xerox of itself. I keep telling people that. Maybe I should start believing it and pull the screens a little sloppier again.

The courier handed it to me and it was warm. Who knows why. The box had a dent the shape of a person sitting on it, and I thought fine, the ream inside is wrapped. It was not wrapped. Cotton paper absorbs everything it touches and apparently it had been touching a box that spent two days in a warehouse that smells like diesel and damp cardboard. So the top thirty sheets now smell like a truck. Not visibly ruined, just smelling, which is worse, because you can't photograph the problem and you can't prove anything. I have a show in March. I need 40 good prints and I've been working toward them since October. So now I'm doing the thing where I hold each sheet up to the window like a doctor looking at an x-ray, deciding which ones I'm going to pretend are fine. The funny part is I make work about the multiple, about the copy, about how a print is never really the original. So the universe has a sense of humor about me being precious with paper. But there's a difference between the idea of the reproducible and the smell of my studio right now, which is a rented Mazda. I've started leaving them out with a bowl of bicarbonate next to them like it's a sick animal. Tell me if you know a better trick, or tell me I'm being dramatic. Both fine.

For three days I've had a pale streak in every riso print coming off the drum, right through the middle of the image, in exactly the same place. I redid the master. Twice. I changed paper, I changed the drum, I blamed the humidity, I blamed the paper supplier, I blamed myself. This morning I finally get a loupe on the screen itself and there it is. A hair. Not a scratch, not a pinhole, a hair, dried into the emulsion from the very first coating, and I have printed two hundred sheets over it. Two hundred sheets. Some of them were decent. All of them carry my own hair like a signature I didn't sign. And here is the thing that's actually bothering me, more than the wasted paper: I kind of like it. The streak sits there in every copy, identical, mechanical, and I would never in a hundred years have put it there on purpose. It is the only mark in the whole edition that wasn't a decision. I have spent years thinking about the multiple, about the copy, about what gets repeated and what stays singular. Fine, theory is cheap. Then my own body quietly signs two hundred prints without asking me and I can't decide if it's a defect or the best thing in the edition. I could reprint. Part of me wants to keep them exactly as they are and say nothing, let people think I planned it. Anyway. Off to buy a loupe that actually works, and to have a word with my head.

I just finished an edition of 25 screenprints that took me four months from the first drawing to the last pull. Copper plates, inks, paper, the studio time, the proofs I rejected along the way. Sold the whole edition to a gallery for €900, which sounds fine until you do the real math and realize the materials alone were close to half that, and the gallery takes 50% on top. So I made 25 objects by hand and I think I netted something like €6 an hour. The gallery is happy. The collector is happy. I'm the only one who knows the number. The part I keep turning over is that I priced it like a print. Like the edition makes it cheap, because it's a multiple, because the original is the plate and the prints are just copies of it. But each one of those copies took my hands on it. That logic is from an old world where printmaking was a reproduction tool, not a primary medium. I keep selling work on a pricing model that was built for something printmaking no longer is, and I don't know if I'm too scared to break it or just can't figure out what the new number should be. I raised the price on the next edition by €300 and I'm already scared nobody takes it.

I pulled thirty trial proofs of a two-plate etching this week, over three days, same plate, same pressure, and the first twenty-nine went straight in the bin. Not bad prints. Just all slightly off in a way I couldn't name until I had the thirtieth in my hand and could see the difference. The thirtieth has a slip. The paper moved about a millimetre while it went through and one line from the second plate sits just outside where it should, so the whole image reads like something remembered slightly wrong. That's the one I want. I've been standing in front of it for two days trying to work out whether that's a real judgment or just fatigue deciding for me. The thing I keep circling: in an edition, the slip is the error. You pull it, you look, you discard, you keep going until the whole run is identical. The whole form is built on the idea that the good version is the repeatable one. But the actual object I care about here is the one that can't happen twice. Maybe that's not news to anyone. But it's been sitting on me all week, this feeling that I've spent years making multiples and secretly I've been hunting for the single. And I chose a medium that refuses to give it to me.

Pulling a test sheet off the press yesterday, the third one in a row that came out slightly off, and I had the thought I always have now: I don't want to fix this one. For those who don't print: registration is the alignment of the layers. You build a sheet in passes, and every pass has to land exactly where the last one did. There is a whole apparatus of crosses, pins, mylar, tape. It exists so the reproduction is faithful to the matrix. So the copy disappears into the original. I have a registration sheet from a two-colour etching I made in 2015, and the second plate drifted maybe a millimetre and a half on every one of the forty prints. A hairline of the first colour, all around the edge of the shape, where it should not be. I kept the sheet. Not as a memento, more as an argument I was having with myself. Because a perfect multiple has no author. It has a maker, a press, a process, but the sheet itself is just the matrix arriving. The misalignment is the one thing the plate cannot reproduce. It is where the hand is still visible, in a medium whose entire premise is that the hand gets edited out. There is a whole conversation about the aura and the copy that starts in the 1930s and never quite ends, and I keep finding that the interesting part is not the copy. It is the error. The copy is the system working. The error is the system admitting someone was standing there. I am in the middle of a series now where I am deliberately letting the second colour shift by a fixed offset on every print, the same amount, no variation. Which is its own trap, I know. I have turned the accident into a rule. A rule is reproducible. So I am back to no hand, just a more interesting system. I don't have a neat place to land this. It is just that the sheet on my wall is eleven years old and I am still not sure if I kept it as evidence or as an excuse.

Honest one. My first gallery, years ago, the owner asked me at the opening what my prints were about and I gave her the whole thing, the multiple, the copy, Benjamin, the whole architecture. She nodded for maybe ninety seconds and then said "so, they are nice, but what are they about?" I still think about that. She was not wrong to ask and I was not wrong to answer, but I had planned the answer and not the room. Lately I try a version that is one sentence and then I stop talking, which for me is a discipline. What is yours? The real one you say out loud, not the one on the website. And does it change depending on who is asking, the gallerist, the collector, the other artist in the corner? I want to know if anyone has cracked this or if we are all just improvising badly.

A curator in Kreuzberg asked me for a small edition to sell at the door of a group show, 30 riso prints, two colours, A3. I said 180 euro without thinking. She said yes immediately, which should have told me something. I did the math later, in the car, and it is 6 euro per print. Before the paper, before the second pass through the machine, before the hour I spend registering the two layers so they don't drift half a centimetre. Riso is fast but it is not free. I think my actual material cost is about 90 cents per sheet once I count the misprints, and there are always misprints. The thing I cannot get past is not the number itself. It is that 180 sounded generous to me when I said it. I heard myself say it and thought, that's a nice round figure, that's friendly. Friendly to who. There is a version of this where I email her and say actually it is 300. I have written that email twice and deleted it twice. Because I know the real reason I said 180, and it is not that I am generous, it is that a door sale at a group show felt like it did not count as a real commission, so I priced it as if it were a favour. Which means the work I make to be reproduced cheaply, the multiple, the whole reason I am in this medium, is the work I value least by default. That is the part I keep chewing on.

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.

Early on, a gallery told me my work would sell better if I made editions, numbered prints, multiples, something they could move more of. I understood the logic, but cyanotypes are so much about the single moment, the sun that day, that particular seawater, the way the paper dries. I couldn't make myself do it. I said no and walked away, and it took me a while to feel sure about that decision. What's the thing a gallery asked you to change about your work that you wouldn't, or maybe should have, and how did you know?

I realised this today while staring at a zinc plate I'd already degreased and just couldn't bring myself to touch. With etching you have all these steps before you actually commit, polishing, degreasing, grounding, smoking, and I love that. It's a ritual that delays the moment of actually having to decide something. Painting friends of mine talk about the terror of the white canvas and I kind of don't relate. But I think what I actually can't handle is the single object. The one painting, the one drawing, the one definitive version. Printmaking lets me hide inside the idea of the multiple, if this print fails, there are 49 more chances, and also it's just one of an edition so it doesn't carry the whole weight. I wonder how much of our medium choice is just a sophisticated way of managing anxiety about finality. What's your medium's built-in escape route from commitment?

A small gallery in Kreuzberg offered me a solo room in November. Four weeks, no fee, they take 40 percent. I said no, or rather I said give me two days and then I said no, and I have been slightly uneasy about it since. The reason is boring and unglamorous: the prints pay for the plates. My last edition of 30, at €40, sold out in three weeks, entirely through Instagram DMs and one afternoon at a bookshop table. The etching plates for that series cost me €260 each. I am not running a business, I am running a very slow machine that eats copper and occasionally gives back rent. What I cannot decide is whether this is good sense or cowardice. A solo show would be the thing you are supposed to want. But the last group show I did, six months of emails and a wall text nobody read, and I sold nothing and met two people. The print sales are not prestige. They are just the medium doing what it is designed to do, which is to be multiple and cheap and travel. I keep thinking about Benjamin and then feeling like an idiot for thinking about Benjamin while counting €40 notes. Somewhere in my head there is a version of this where the gallery leads to the collector who buys the whole suite. I have not met that person. I have met about ninety people who own one print and hang it in the kitchen, and honestly those are better conversations. Anyone else made this trade, or is it just me rationalising?

The edition is 12 and I have been at the same zinc plate since Thursday. The image is fine. The problem is that I keep pulling proofs to check the bite and then keeping the ones that are "nice", and now I have eleven nice prints and no idea which one is the print. My printer friend says this is the whole point of an edition, that the multiplicity is the work, the small differences are the variable. I know the theory. I have read the theory. I have even written about the theory. But at 1am in the studio with a fan going and my hands black to the wrist, the theory feels like something I say to other people. In practice I am standing there choosing between eleven nearly identical sheets like a woman picking tomatoes, and every one of them is a little bit wrong in a different place. The third one has a softer edge on the left where the felt slipped. The eleventh has a cleaner line and less atmosphere. I like the third. I should not like the third, because liking the third is liking a mistake, and then what do I do, print eleven more mistakes on purpose? I am also aware, and this is the part that actually bothers me, that if I frame the third one and call it the definitive state, it becomes the original, and the other ten become copies of it, and I have spent eleven years arguing that this is a lie.

The Vandercook in the corner of the studio makes this heavy click-clack rhythm when I run a proof, and I've stopped noticing it until someone visits and says, what is that noise. And then I notice it and I realize I like it. Like a metronome that doesn't care about tempo. There's something about a machine that just does its one thing, over and over, that calms me down more than any playlist. Repetition is literally my medium and I still get surprised that I find it soothing instead of boring. Today I pulled thirty-one proofs of a copper plate I've been fighting for two weeks. The inking is finally even. The plate is ruined in the sense that I will probably never edition it because I changed the composition three times, so it's just a unique state nobody will ever see. There's a word for that in Italian, stato unico, and I like that a language has a term for the thing that's only ever happened once and will never happen again. Printmaking is supposed to be about multiples. Sometimes the one-off is the honest version. Anyway. The click sound is still going. I think I'd actually miss it on the days I don't print.

Pulled the third state of a plate this morning and it was bad. Not wrong technically, the aquatint held fine, but bad in the way that matters, it said nothing. And I had already written 1/12, 2/12 in pencil on the bottom of the first two. There's a small horror specific to printmaking here. A painter scrapes down a canvas and no one knows. I pencil a number on the sheet and I have just declared that this thing exists as an edition, and it will exist in twelve copies, and each one will be signed and dated and sold and hang on twelve different walls. The commitment happens before the doubt. I know the theory. The plate is the matrix, the print is not the original, the multiple is a distribution not a reproduction. Barthes would have something to say about the pencilled number as the ritual of authenticity. But at 9am with a bad sheet in my hand none of that helps me. I am holding twelve lies, or one lie twelve times. I am going to destroy the plate. Not cancel it with a scratch, actually destroy it. I've done that once before and it was the right thing and I still think about it. Curious if other print people here have a rule about this. Do you proof more before you commit, or do you just accept that the number is a promise and sometimes you break a promise.