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The mark behind the print: A short history of the printer's chop

  • Writer: Irene Michnicki
    Irene Michnicki
  • Jul 25
  • 8 min read

Updated: 14 hours ago

A grid of various printer's chops

Look closely at the lower corner of any fine art print made in a collaborative workshop within the last 65 years or so and you'll find a small embossed symbol pressed into the paper. Sometimes hard to see, but the right lighting will create a shadow and raise the design gently from the surface. This is a chop, sometimes called a blindstamp or drystamp, and it's a characteristic tradition in collaborative printmaking. It tells you who made the print possible: the collaboration between artist and printer at the press.


What is a printer's chop?


A chop is a small identifying mark, embossed or occasionally stamped in ink, that records the workshop and often the individual printer behind an edition. Tamarind Institute, the training ground for collaborative fine art printers founded by June Wayne in 1960, describes the practice plainly: chops are the identifying symbols of the print studio and the printer, usually embossed into the paper itself, though sometimes stamped in ink on the back of the sheet. Only impressions that meet the workshop's standards get the chop. Flawed impressions are destroyed rather than marked and released.


The printer's chop is a mark of quality, related more to the practice of a hallmark on silver than a signature flourish. It's not necessarily a mark meant to signify authorship entirely (although this is part of being a collaborator), but it is more along the lines of "this came from my hand and I stand behind it". Not every limited-edition print carries a chop either. Artists who print their own work typically don't use them, since the printer's chop traditionally exists to record a collaboration, not a solo effort.


Where the tradition comes from


The practice traces back through etching and lithography workshops across Europe and America, but Tamarind is where it became a standard for the modern American print world. When June Wayne founded the workshop, she was working to professionalize a medium that had, in her words, been let go slack by decades of inconsistent practice.

"Tamarind systemized print language, defining what was meant by trial and artist's proofs, numbered prints, states, separations, and progressive proofs. We made documentation into a routine aspect of selling prints. We listed edition sizes, runs, techniques, colors, papers, and dimensions; provided a lexicon of chops; and initiated a hundred bits of language, all taken for granted today." - June Wayne

Tamarind's workshop in Albuquerque, NM
Tamarind's workshop in Albuquerque, NM

In other words, the chop is part of a whole vocabulary of trust that print workshops built together in the twentieth century, so that a collector a hundred years from now could look at an edition and know exactly what they were holding.


Tamarind's shop chop is an alchemist's symbol for stone, chosen because it nodded to the material at the center of lithography itself. Every print made at the workshop carries it alongside the mark of the individual printer who pulled that particular edition.


An older tradition: Jade chops and seals


The word "chop" itself didn't originate in a Western print shop. It comes from the Hindi word chāp, meaning stamp or imprint, which was brought to the English language through colonial trade interactions in the early 1800s and was carried into Chinese Pidgin English by merchants doing business in China. English speakers used it to describe the seals stamped and carved there. The word stuck and here we are. It's still the everyday term for a seal in Hong Kong English today.


Seals have a much older history in China than the word does. What became known as "seal script," one of the earliest standardized forms of Chinese writing, took its name from its use on personal seals, and the form was regularized further under the Han dynasty. Tang dynasty scribes were using ink seals that soon became common on paintings and works of calligraphy, denoting authorship, ownership, and appreciation. Early seals were generally cut from hard materials like jade and bronze by professional craftsmen. Over time, painters started carving softer stones on their own, a shift that let seal-making become an artistic practice in its own right rather than a craftsman's trade, making it prized alongside painting, calligraphy, and poetry.


What makes this tradition especially unique is how a painting keeps accumulating seals over its lifetime. Unlike a Western print, where the chop is embossed onto the paper by the printer or shop after printing, a Chinese painting or scroll could pick up new seals from each owner or admirer who encounters it across the centuries. This acts as a visual record of everyone who has held and valued the work, stamped directly into the object itself.


The materials differ from what we use in Western printmaking (stone and jade in place of an embossing tool), and so does the method (a red imprint rather than a blind stamp), but the underlying meaning is related. The printer's chop is a small imprinted mark that ties a work to the hand of the printer and reputation behind it.


A mark required by law in 19th century France


Some traditions of marking a printed work grew out of pride in craft. In nineteenth-century France, designation of prints came out of government control.


Between 1810 and 1881, anyone who wanted to work as a printer, bookseller, or lithographer in France needed a brevet. This was a license granted by the Ministry of the Interior after a background check and a review of the applicant's character and qualifications. Practicing without one was illegal. On top of that, printed material of almost every kind, including books, pamphlets, and prints such as lithographs, were subject to dépôt légal. Impressions were required to be submitted to the state, where they were logged, and in some periods reviewed for approval before publication was allowed at all. A similar requirement ran alongside licensing and registration: the printer's name and address had to appear on the work itself, usually printed along the lower margin of a lithograph or the title page of a book, so that a print could always be traced back to the shop and the individual responsible for it.


This is a very different spirit from a chop or a seal. Printers in nineteenth-century Paris were not carving a personal symbol out of pride in a hard-won craft. The printer's imprint was a matter of accountability to the state, not choice, and it existed so that the government could always identify who had produced any given piece of printed matter. The requirement was eased with the Law on the Freedom of the Press of 1881, which took away the old licensing system and declared that printing and publication were free, though the practice of printing a shop's name and address on a work has, in one form or another, persisted in France ever since.


This is a useful contrast to compare alongside the chop and the seal. French legal imprint, Chinese seal, and the Tamarind-style chop. All three of these traditions established a name with a print; However, the French tradition wasn't always a choice.


Why the printer's chop still matters


Museum collections and seasoned collectors rely on chops constantly. A cataloguer looking at an unsigned or ambiguously dated lithograph will often find the chop first, since it can confirm which workshop produced a piece and sometimes narrow down when. Auction houses and collectors read chops the same way a jeweler reads a hallmark: as a small, quiet guarantee that the print came from a specific hand, in a specific place, working to a specific standard and legacy.


A mark of your own


Part of what makes the printmaking chop tradition so appealing is that each printer designs their own. It becomes a professional signature, earned once a printer demonstrates real proficiency.


A few examples give a sense of the range:

  • Stephen Britko, who trained at Tamarind and later opened Naravisa Press in Santa Fe, used the Russian letter Ы (a nod to his Russian heritage) as his chop.

  • Jean Milant, founder of Cirrus Editions in Los Angeles, chose two cirrus clouds, a quiet pun on the workshop's own name.

  • Judith Solodkin, the first woman to earn Tamarind Master Printer status and founder of Solo Impression in New York, uses a symbol of a hand with the index finger pointing as her printer's chop.


That last one is a favorite around here. It's simple, playful, and it says exactly what a chop is meant to say: this is the hand that pulled this print. Hats off to Judith. ;)


The chops of Milestone Graphics


Every print that leaves our studio carries a chop of its own. In recent times, the chop on prints leaving the shop belongs to Irene Michnicki, our current owner and collaborative printer. She designed it while training in Tamarind Institute's Printer Training Program and it was presented to her upon completing that program, keeping with the same tradition described above. The printer's chop is a mark earned once the individual demonstrates proficiency as a printer and collaborator.



Irene Michnicki's chop
Irene Michnicki's chop

Irene's design combines her first initial, I, rendered in a serifed letterform, with a crescent moon resting at its base. Together the two elements form a single symbol whose roots reach back to Diana, or Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Diana is traditionally shown with a bow and arrow, a connection to the moon, and a dog at her side, and each of those associations found its way into the mark's design. To learn more about Irene Michnicki and her practice as a collaborative printer, visit our page Meet the Printer.


James Reed's chop
James Reed's chop

Founder James Reed's chop takes the form of a single reed leaf. This is the same symbol scribes used, cut down to its simplest gesture and a quiet play on his name, but it reaches further back than that. Scribes cut and shaped reed stems into their first pens, carrying ink across papyrus long before paper existed.


The reed held a second meaning for those same scribes: a unit of measure. Scribes used the khet, a rod of one hundred cubits, to survey and record land, and they measured the reed against it. Using the reed for measurement meant fixing a point along a longer stretch of ground. This is the same function that a milestone serves on a road today. It's a fitting echo for a chop that marks the quality of a print made at Milestone.


To learn more about James Reed and the studio's founding, please visit our page About the Studio.


Something to think about the next time you're in front of an original print is identifying a printer's chop. Whether it's a lithograph, an etching, relief print or a combination of methods. Somewhere in the margin, there may be a small raised mark with a story behind it. It could be a symbol for stone, a letter from someone's heritage, a hand pointing at what it made, or on the prints made at Milestone Graphics, the pen of a scribe or an initial and crescent moon rooted in the goddess of the hunt.


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