We asked David Bull, our contemporary woodblock renaissance man, "What's your take on how good comparing blocks will be as a means of finding copies? Do you think it's possible to make new blocks so perfectly you can't tell them apart from the original blocks?"

Here are some of Dave's thoughts:

"Not really. Leaving aside the upcoming stuff like microscopic laser carving, in which case all bets are off, it is not possible to carve a block that is so similar that it will be undetected. Note that I'm speaking of a 'Yoshida' type of print here ... not an ukiyo-e print. There is a very big difference.

"In the case of the ukiyo-e stuff, the lines are generally very smooth and flowing. A good carver can get very very close to the original. But in the case of these shin hanga prints, they use a great deal of kasure-bori (scratch effect carving), and this can't be copied. The carver digs into the block this way and that with the point of the knife, cutting a zillion little lines that cross each other and pull away splits and chips of the wood, almost randomly.

"Now theoretically, you could work very slowly and carefully and carve an exact reproduction of this, but in practice, it's just not possible. So any print with this sort of carving in it (and that is most of the shin hanga prints), will always show differences when compared to an original.

"(For some images of this stuff, see my on-line copy of the Yoshida book on printmaking techniques, Chapter Two, Figures 7~10. It's in the Library at woodblock.com.)"

***

"I doubt very much that there is going to be a flood of Yoshida reproductions coming onto the market. For a start, anybody who was going to make fakes didn't need to wait for the copyright to come open - if they are being made, they are out there already.

"But another reason is the very basic one that simply there aren't any printers left who can do that kind of work. You like "Misty Day in Nikko"? So do I, but even if I had the 14 original blocks here in front of me, there is no way in the world that I could reproduce the 74 impressions that the original took. Those prints have so many layerings and overprintings, that they just cannot be 'reverse engineered', the way that an ukiyo-e print can.

"Even the Yoshidas themselves don't try to do that when they are reprinting - they keep proof sheets of all the separate impressions needed for each of these prints. (I'd sure like to get my hands on some of those ...)

"There aren't more than three or four guys left who could make a good print of this type any more: Komatsu-san (the Yoshida family printer), Seki-san (when he 'feels like it'), maybe Nakajo-san ... and perhaps a couple more.

"Give it another ten years, and it's game over ..."

***

Our last question: "I wonder how many fake woodblock prints I have in my collection that I think are real?"

Dave: "If you can't tell, then what difference does it make! Enjoy them!"