Every plate the shop has ever bitten is stacked in the rack room by its mark. The counter
terminal will walk the racks for you: write the mark on a docket, and it comes back with the
shelf line for anything that carries it. Wildcards are how the old hands do it —
bee-skep-* pulls every state of the one plate.
On the shelf list
| Mark | Plate | Ground | State |
|---|---|---|---|
bee-skep-state-iii.cu |
Bee Skep and Thyme | hard ground | III of IV |
harbour-crane-proof.cu |
Harbour Crane, Low Water | hard ground, spit bite | trial proof |
foxglove-aquatint.cu |
Foxglove in a Jar | rosin aquatint | II of II |
thistle-drypoint.cu |
Thistle, Burr Intact | drypoint, no ground | I of I |
frontispiece-mordant.cu |
Frontispiece, Mordant Row | soft ground | IV of IV |
House rules
- Dockets are brushed with stop-out varnish before they reach the rack room, so a sharp mark cannot bite anywhere the shop did not intend.
- The rack room is the whole of
/var/. The shop's own papers — ledgers, commissions, the acid book — are kept at the front, well out of the racks. - Cancelled plates keep their marks. If a sheet comes back empty the copper was scraped.