“In 1993 I found myself in the Cape Town magistrates court, sued under the Legal Deposit Act by the South African Library, for a copy of a book I had made in 1991 which contained within it a number of original prints. On one of the days of the case during a testing discussion about the discipline of printmaking, the attorney for the plaintiff battled to come to terms with the idea of an "original" print. How, he argued, can a print-an etching or a lithograph-be "original" when there is more than one of them? And if you can make exact copies of these "original" prints, how then could you tell the difference between the original and the copy?”
