What a limited edition actually means

A limited edition is a promise to stop. That is the whole of it. Somebody says this image will be printed 250 times and never again, and then has to keep their word for the next thirty years.

Everything else about editions follows from whether you believe that sentence.

Limited, open, original

Three words, and they describe three different objects.

An **open edition** keeps being printed for as long as people want it. Nothing dishonest about it. It just will not be scarce, and it should not be priced as though it were.

A **limited edition** stops at a stated number. The number has to be fixed before the first one sells, not decided later when demand turns out to be good.

An **original** is the object the artist made, and there is one of it. A print is not a small original, it is a different thing entirely, and we wrote about the difference.

What our numbers are

The run gets smaller as the format gets bigger, which is the opposite of what people expect, so it is worth stating plainly.

• 21 x 30 cm: **250**
• 30 x 40 cm and 30 x 30 cm: **200**
• 40 x 50 cm: **150**
• 50 x 70 cm and 50 x 50 cm: **100**
• 61 x 91 cm and 70 x 70 cm: **50**

Choosing a size is therefore also choosing an edition. The large formats are the scarce ones, and they are scarce by five times over the small ones.

Every print page shows how many of that size are left. Not a marketing bar that always says "almost gone", the actual remaining count, which for most works today reads like the full number because most works are new.

What the certificate is for

Every print ships with a Certificate of Authenticity. It is not decoration and it is not a guarantee of value.

It records which image, which size, which number out of the run, and who made it. That record is what lets somebody in twenty years establish that the thing on their wall is one of 100 rather than one of an unknown quantity.

Keep it. People throw these away and then discover, when they come to sell or insure, that the print and the paperwork are worth more together than the print alone.

What an edition is not

A number is not quality. There is a lot of mediocre work printed in editions of 50, and the number does nothing for any of it.

A number is not an investment either. Prints by living artists mostly do not appreciate, and anybody selling you one on that basis is selling you something else. Buy it because you want to look at it.

And a small number is not automatically better than a large one. An edition of 250 by somebody whose work you keep returning to beats an edition of 25 by somebody you had to be convinced about.

The questions that settle it

Ask what the run is, and expect a number rather than "limited".

Ask whether the number is per size or across all sizes, because those are very different promises. Ours is per size.

Ask what happens when it sells out. The honest answer is that it is finished, not that a second edition might appear in another colourway.

Ask whether it is numbered on the print or only on the certificate.

None of those questions is rude. A seller who has thought about editions has the answers ready, and a seller who has not will change the subject to how nice the paper is.

The prints are here, with the count on each, and the originals here if one of something is what you were after.