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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

With regards to buying a print of the Great Wave from David Bulls work shop (which I'd personally consider as original as any other print), I got this e-mail from the Mokuhan team back in January:

> The printing is going very slowly - we limit each run to a maximum of 60 sheets, in order not to overly wear out the key block. And we cannot turn our top printers (the ones working on this project) into 'Zombie Great Wave Printing Machines'. They take turns working on this one, mixed in with plenty of work on subscription prints and other designs, so we end up with a new batch of prints every 7~8 weeks or so.

> [...] At present this email address is in position [ 2,017 ] from the top of the list

I signed up, gosh, feels like years ago.

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I got one years ago, and was a little bit underwhelmed but I'm not sure why. I originally thought the colour of the boats was off, but looking online it seems that some people render them in a richer red/brown than they actually are.

My copy actually is just lying in a cupboard in the original packaging. I never got around to actually displaying it!

Beware the import duty from Japan too!

The whole wood-block printing process is amazing, I just wish he'd branch out from copying Japanese stuff. Hardly any of his other works float my boat.

The British Museum have published some great info on the variations. It's best as this video https://youtu.be/U_025NB8alw or the PDF research paper equivalent.

My personal favourite impression is the one at Claude Monet's house in Giverny, France. I'm yet to see it in person, but they have a high resolution photo online. In this one the boats are muted and Fuji looks like a small wave. Of course, originally the colours may have been wildly different! https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/115623713193900851...

I saw this one a few weeks ago. It's sad that it's displayed with a highly reflective glass cover in a very bright room. It's impossible to take in the whole thing at once.

That video is excellent! Thanks for sharing

> My copy actually is just lying in a cupboard in the original packaging. I never got around to actually displaying it!

Interested in finding it a new home?

I guess they only make 400/year so I guess it will take many years to get to the top of the list.

Woah, I had no idea of the queue. I'll settle for my current mass-produced print.

I don't understand this rotating crafter thing. Wouldn't you want your crafters to be experts in their craft? How is rotating them making them better at this?

Printmaking requires care and attention, and doesn't pay great. It falls squarely in the 'art career' category, where people choose it for reasons other than comp. If you have to print the same image every day, potentially indefinitely, the type of person who chose to be a printmaker is going to get sick of it.

Aah, its a supply side thing. That actually makes sense, I would leave a job too if all I did was write the same html page all day.

(Don't know if that is a fair analogy, maybe a better one exists on sysadmin side?)

Because programming is meta-applicable, competent practitioners will respond to being given the same task over and over by automating it, which isn't a thing if the whole point of what you do is that a human did it manually.

Princess Nell's observation about the nature of the Dovetail community in the novel Diamond Age applies: this is all very well, but it makes no actual sense without the context of the rest of society, on its own this practice is not tenable.

It would seem nobody wants to be good at only printing one picture.

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