ABSTRACT
As is the case with almost anything a person may collect as his fancy dictates, the collector of old Japanese colour-prints has to be on his guard against forgeries, reprints, and modern reproductions. Reproductions are prints taken from a modern wood block cut from an original print, or from a photographic process block. Reprints are taken from an original block, but so long after the block was cut that the outline is coarse and defective and the colouring poor, usually from modern aniline dyes. Forgeries are prints produced in the style and bearing the signature of some well-known artist, done either during his lifetime by a rival artist, or after his death. Thanks to modern processes of reproduction the outline of an imitation may be line for line exactly like the original; but even if the paper should be a close imitation, the colours at once proclaim its modernity and afford the safest guide to genuineness.
