Posted by Richard Parks on August 24, 2001 at 10:08:31:
I've dug through the archives and haven't seen anything on this, so I'm hoping someone can help me. It's my understanding that the sumi ink signatures and red seals used within the image of a woodblock print were printed from a block themselves and not added individually. My question is, would the signatures always appear in the same place on the image on different editions printed from the original blocks? I had assumed they would, yet I've compared a scan of an early H. Yoshida print against what I believe to be one of the commemorative editons of the same print and everything, to my untrained eye, matches except for the position of the signature and red seal. The sumi ink signature is lower and the red "Hiroshi" seal is further to the right in my print. Was this common?