A print is an image made from a prepared surface. An engraver cut the lines into a copper plate, an etcher bit them in with acid, a lithographer drew on stone, and the inked surface was then pressed onto paper, over and over.
This is how ordinary people got pictures before photography. A painting went to one house, but a print run went to hundreds, and for most of the nineteenth century the print on the parlour wall was how a family owned a view of the Highlands or a portrait of somebody they admired. It also means prints are the affordable end of old art, and a good one framed properly holds its own next to a painting.
A fair number of antique prints started life inside books. Illustrated volumes and atlases were broken up when they fell apart, and the plates were sold separately, which is why an old print sometimes has a fold down the middle or text on the reverse.
Telling a period print from a modern copy is not difficult once you know what to look at. An engraving or etching usually has a plate mark, the shallow indentation where the edge of the metal plate pressed into damp paper, and the lines are solid to the eye. A modern photographic reproduction has no plate mark and breaks into a regular pattern of dots under magnification.
Prints come in as we find them, so it is worth checking back.
