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context: painting > prints > technical
The Printer
I know next to nothing of this role. It took care, in terms of accurate register (by means of carved notches), rubbing on the inks with a pad, and to know when a block needed replacing. The number of impressions from a set of blocks varied - there is a Hokusai letter specifying a limit of 200 prints from a block. There is a 19th Century biography of Utagawa Kunisada claiming that 3-4,000 impressions might be made from a set of blocks, and there are suggestions that some very popular prints might have had as many as 10,000 editions printed without recutting. Christine Guth suggests 200 impressions per run in the 18th Century, 1,000 or more in the 19th. Surimono seem likely to have been issued in very limited editions, 200 or fewer. The oban and chuban were the most standard paper sizes.