Introduction How do I know it's authentic? How do I know that the price is right? Can I Try To negotiate a better price? Is it a good investment? Am I getting a bargain? Shouldn't I buy only famous prints? Suppose I've never heard of an artist? What about stolen goods? What if I don't know about prints or drawings? How many of them were made? How good is the quality? What should I collect? How many of them were made? This is a vital question to ask about twentieth-century prints, a reasonable one to ask about nineteenth-century prints, and a generally unanswerable and meaningless one to ask about anything earlier. With rare exceptions, artists only began to keep track of the number of impressions printed in the nineteenth century. Before that, the edition was limited naturally by the deterioration of the matrix from which it was printed, so the first and last impressions off the plate look very different indeed. A more useful question about earlier prints might be, "How many of them are still around?", but you shouldn't be terribly surprised if you can't always get an answer to that question either. The really important question to ask about earlier prints (and many nineteenth-century ones too) is "How good is the quality?"