How the market works, what provenance actually is, how attribution is reached, and what condition and conservation mean in practice. Written to answer the questions a collector is left to work out alone.
Alongside the articles, questions collectors ask answers sixteen of them directly: provenance and how to check it, the graded language of attribution, condition in a tropical climate, and the terms used for books, maps and prints.
For Collectors
Before photography, an image of Ceylon reached the world only as a print. The three families of printmaking behind those images, how to tell them apart on the sheet in front of you, and why two apparently identical impressions of the same view are not worth the same.