ather than seeing it as a challenge to the validity of his premise, Phillips reads the absence of incorrectly registered impressions as evidence of Blake’s genius at consistently concealing his hand. Phillips looked for other indications of two-pull printing, not based on absences, and found two. His first piece of positive evidence is the title plate to Experience of Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy T¹ (illus. 41a). Because he can see with infrared light the etched date “1794” lying under an opaque color (illus. 41b), Phillips claims that Blake first printed the date in ink and then the colors covering it (103). But Phillips does not argue (much less prove) that the opaque colors were printed from the plate, nor does he consider the possibility that these colors were painted on the impression, as they often were. For example, the black opaque colors in America copy A and Europe copy A were applied to the impressions and are not printed from the plate. In Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy E, “Infant Sorrow,” the Experience title page and frontispiece, “A Dream,” and “The Garden of Love” have a black color that is easily confused with true color printing. The Book of Urizen copy B is described by Bentley as being color printed (Books 170), but it is not; black, gray, green, and red opaque colors were applied over the black ink, possibly while it was still tacky, to produce a reticulated effect. A detail of the paint layer on plate 1 of The Song of Los copy E (illus. 42) demonstrates that Blake used his thick, opaque paints to finish color prints by hand, directly on the impressions, as well as to color print from the copperplates. The gray opaque paint in “The Fly” (illus. 43) of Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy F, which was printed in the same session as Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy T¹, demonstrates the same.

Colors applied to the impression by brush are smoother and usually thinner than colors printed from the plate, which are spongy or reticulated. The difference is easily seen in the title plate of The Book of Urizen copy D (illus. 44a-44b), where the reticulated bluish-gray color printed from the shallows of the tablets and knees is outlined on the impression in a darker hue of the same color. Note also that colors printed over ink do not fully hide but mix with the ink; that is, traces of the ink remain visible in the reticulations of the colors, because colors and ink were both printed wet. The same effect is created when color and ink are printed sequentially or if color is applied to wet or tacky ink. In fact, by adding opaque colors to the impressions while the ink was still tacky, the facsimilists of the Manchester Etching Workshop were able to create the look and feel of printed colors, as is demonstrated by their facsimile of “Infant Sorrow” (illus. 45; Viscomi, ”Recreating” 11). Colors brushed over dry ink appear smoother.

Phillips is right about the color over the date indicating a second stage in the production of the impression, but that second stage did not involve printing the color in a second pull. Had Blake done that, the wet colors would have mixed with the wet ink. Rather, the color was applied over the date when the impression was being finished in watercolors and pen and ink. These overlying colors have much smoother textures than the reticulated surfaces of printed colors. Further, if the colors had been printed over the date when the inked numbers were still wet, they would have mixed with the colors and become streaked or fuzzy, or even dissolved completely into the overlying colors. But, as Phillips' ultra-violet photograph of the impression (his color plate 50) reveals, the underlying numbers are clear and crisp. The colors must have been applied over the date when the ink was dry—and the ink would not have been dry if the overlying colors had been printed immediately after the first pull as part of a two-pull printing process.

The evidence that the color over the date was applied as part of the finishing, and not printing, process is not merely based on technical necessity and many precedents, but on a close examination of the impression itself, which is much worked over in opaque colors and washes, and on a comparison with the other extant impressions from the same printing session, the Experience title plate in Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies F and G (the impression from copy H is untraced). In the copy F impression, the date is left uncovered but the colors printed from the shallows wrap around it in exactly the same pattern that we find in copy T¹ (see illus. 46a for both impressions). The same pattern is present in the copy G impression (illus. 46b). Since the space below the date is blank (i.e., there are no relief lines creating the pattern), it is reasonable to conclude that the repetition of this pattern is not accidental but a matter of the impressions being color printed in the same printing session without much adding or cleaning of the colors between pulls. Moreover, the comparison reveals that the white lines between shallows and relief areas, so overt in copies F and G, are, in copy T¹, completely painted over in the same gray color as that covering the date. The pattern of color printing shared by the impressions is further revealed by changing the contrast and midtones in the T¹ impression to reveal the white lines of the escarpments and other unprinted areas before being painted over (illus. 47). The color over the date clearly belongs to the color added to the escarpments when the impression was finished in colors and watercolors.

Phillips’ second piece of positive evidence is his claim that there is a single tiny hole in the paper of the title page, “Introduction,” “Earth’s Answer,” and “London” from the Experience section of Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy T¹. These four impressions are now in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. He states (98) that “in all four copies [meaning “prints"] there is a pinhole in the upper left corner just outside of the plate image (plates 49 & 66 [his reproductions of title plate and “London”]).” According to Phillips, “this reveals that Blake used the traditional method of registration for printing a single sheet from more than one plate, but that he adapted the technique so that he could print twice from the same plate” (98). This claim, and the hypothesis that it indicates two-pull printing, is based on the use of pinholes in multiple-plate color printing (illus. 10, 13), in which the same-size plates were given pinholes, drilled into the copperplates, in the same positions in each plate. Printing from the first plate indents the holes into the paper; the printer pricks the holes with pins and aligns the paper to these holes when printing from the other plates. (Alternatively, the printer may use such a sheet of paper as a key to prepare a stack of damp paper with corresponding holes just before printing.) Registering paper to plates using this method requires at least two pinholes (Hayter 57), usually top and bottom, though four, one in each corner, appears to have been the norm in the eighteenth century. Because the sheet of paper blocks sight of the plate, this type of registration is done by touch, i.e., a pin through the paper engages the corresponding hole in the plate; the other pins feel for their holes, and when the paper is in position, the paper can be dropped into place (Hayter 58). The holes Phillips claims he found were one per plate, each near the top left corner of the plate.

When we first learned about Phillips’ claims about pinholes, we were immediately dubious for reasons we will discuss below. When we viewed the Songs of Experience title page from copy T¹, displayed in a shallow glass-covered case at the Tate Britain exhibition (number 117c in the catalogue), we could not, from just a few inches from the print, perceive any pinhole. What we found instead were two specks in the sheet of paper near the top left corner of the sheet. The speck nearest the top left corner of the printed image may have been misinterpreted as a pinhole. There are a few other similar specks in the left margin of the sheet and stab holes for binding the leaves (illus. 48). Thus, the only holes in the sheet were made as part of the binding procedure and have nothing to do with printing the plate. These findings were corroborated by our digital scan of the corner of a 4x5 inch color transparency of the image at 3500 dots per inch. Geoffrey Morrow, Senior Conservator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, confirms our findings and has informed us that none of the four plates discussed by Phillips has a pinhole (private written communication, 13 Aug. 2001). Rather, Morrow finds in the top left corner of these four plates, and in all but one print from Songs of Innocence and of Experience in the Ottawa collection (for a total of ten plates), a small ink dot in the top left corner of the plate. The one exception is “A Poison Tree,” which has an ink dot at the top left corner of the framing lines rather than the top left corner of the plate. Six of these marked plates, plus “A Poison Tree,” are from copy T², which is not color printed. Thus, the ink dots could not be related specifically to color printing processes.  

There is no physical evidence that Blake ever experimented with the pinhole method of registration. If the marks at the top left corners of the Ottawa plates were made purposefully (as seems likely, given their presence on so many plates), they could not have had anything to do with registration since they could not have been visible when the paper was placed, face down, onto the copperplates. These marks were very probably made by someone other than Blake after the impressions left his hands. Indeed, they were probably made after the Ottawa plates were detached, as a separate and autonomous group (Bentley, Books 421), from the other T¹ and T² impressions, none of which shows any of the ink dots at issue.

If Phillips could not re-visit Ottawa to confirm the presence of pinholes,
then, as co-curator of the Tate Britain exhibition, he was surely
in a position to study at least the title page to Songs of Experience on loan from Ottawa and comment on the absence of a pinhole in his "Corrigenda" published in Blake/ An Illustrated Quarterly 35 (2001): 30-31. Perhaps he worked from photographs and misinterpreted various flaws in the paper or ink droplets, more or less at the top left corners of the prints, as pinholes. Morrow tells us that, in his correspondence with Phillips, he discussed pinhole registration (see our note 17), but that he never told Phillips that there were actual, observable pinholes in any of the Ottawa prints.

Theoretical superstructures rarely collapse even when their material bases evaporate. It is certainly possible that someone somewhere someday will find an impression of one of Blake’s illuminated books with a tiny hole in the paper. We wish to dissuade researchers of a future age from leaping to the conclusion that such a hole has something to do with registering plate to paper during printing. The reasons for rejecting even the possibility that Blake used single-pinhole registration extend well beyond the mere absence of physical evidence of actual holes.

Phillips does not explain why his supposed pinholes are outside the edge of the plate (the “traditional method” called for the holes to be in the metal itself), and suggests that Blake used a single pin as an axis to “somehow” swing the paper off the plate, which was then removed, wiped of its ink, applied with colors, returned to the bed of the press in exactly the same position, and then the paper was swung (presumably being held off the bed of the press by Mrs. Blake so it would not offset) back exactly into place for the second printing. This seems highly unlikely—or very likely to create a misalignment. One pinhole is only marginally more effective than none at all and requires a second marker, such as a guide line on a bottom sheet (see below), to bring the plate back to its initial position; less than two per plate serves no purpose for keeping the paper in a fixed position.

Besides the lack of practical utility if only one pin is used, it is difficult to explain a circumstance in which only a single impression, produced in a print run that included multiple impressions from each plate, shows a pinhole. Blake printed x number of impressions from one plate before moving to another plate in the same work. If pinholes were made for the purpose of printing the plate twice upon the paper, then the other impressions pulled from each plate in the same press run would also have pinholes. Otherwise, we would be forced to assume that Blake printed one impression with a pinhole, the others without, then moved to a second plate using the pinhole method of registration for one impression, but not for the others, and so on, moving back and forth between using and not using pinholes. This would be an exceedingly inefficient printing method. The assumption that any pinholes were made by Blake, let alone for registration, stands on very shaky ground. Future discoverers of tiny holes in Blake’s relief-etched prints, color printed or not, must consider such holes in the context of the press-run in which the impressions were created and in light of their subsequent histories of ownership, sale, and rebinding.

Phillips, in his discussion of the supposed pinholes in the Ottawa prints, acknowledges the fact that there are no pinholes in any other color-printed impressions. This absence inevitably forces him to conclude that Blake abandoned the procedure, quickly moving on to find different ways to register the plates. Phillips suggests that Blake could have registered them by using a bottom sheet, or by using the roller to grip and hold the paper in place, or by using weights to hold the paper in place and mark the plate’s position (101, 107). All three methods are used today by fine-art printmakers printing multiple plates; but only one method, the bottom sheet, is known to have been used by late eighteenth-century printmakers. By explaining the ways modern printmakers register multiple plates, Phillips again implies that Blake was more innovative than we have realized. References to modern practices also make it seem less improbable that Blake used two-pull printing. Had Blake used any of these methods, however, he still would not have been able to conceal two-pull printing so completely.

A printer can place on the bed of the press a sheet of paper cut to exactly the same size as the sheet to be printed. Marks or lines are then drawn on this “bottom sheet,” as it is generally called, as guides to the placement (and later replacement) of the plate on the bottom sheet. The sheet to be printed is then registered to the four sides of the bottom sheet, thereby replicating the registration of plate to bottom sheet. This procedure is repeated before each pull through the press; registration is assured as long as the plate is placed in its proper position on the bottom sheet and all sheets to be printed are the same size as the bottom sheet. The use of a bottom sheet is indicated by correct registration, with evenly aligned margins between the edges of the printed image and the edges of the paper. In the case of series work—that is, printing a set of impressions from the same plate (and all printing is to some degree series printing)—bottom-sheet registration is indicated by the same sheet size and the same margins among all members of the set. This is what we see in the facsimiles of sixteen plates from Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy B printed by the Manchester Etching Workshop in 1983. Seventy-five impressions were pulled from each plate (35 monochrome and 40 hand colored in imitation of copy B). Using bottom sheets under a sheet of Plexiglas designed to center plates to paper (illus. 49) ensured uniform margins among all impressions from the same plate. For aesthetic reasons, the sheets, at 21 x 17 cm., were larger than Blake’s, approximately 18.5 x 12.5 cm., to create margins of 5 cm. or more between the images and edges of the sheets (illus. 50).

But we never see any of these telltale characteristics of bottom-sheet registration in Blake’s illuminated books. We find instead images that are misaligned to the paper, with top margins greater than bottom, so that the image looks as though it were falling, and images slanted relative to the edges of the paper, so that the plate tilts to the left or right. For example, the top margin of “The Lamb” in Songs of Innocence copy G (illus. 51) is 3.9 cm. while the bottom margin is only 2.8 cm., creating an image that falls very noticeably. “The Shepherd” from the same copy (illus. 52) slants to the left and, with a top margin of 4.5 cm. and a bottom of only 3.5 cm., falls on the page. “The Little Boy Lost” from the same copy (illus. 53) tilts towards the spine. Further, the margins of the various impressions pulled from the same plate in the same printing session all differ. All these characteristics violate the bibliographic and print-publishing conventions of Blake’s time; slanted images stray from any standard of alignment and symmetry. In general, the registration of plate to paper in the illuminated books is quite poor, possibly one of the features that prompted William Muir to refer to Blake’s printing as “skillful carelessness.”

Catherine and William Blake did not obsess over exact registration. Indeed, in a deleted passage in his “Public Address,” Blake wrote that “Spots & Blemishes” in works of art “are beauties & not faults” (E 576). Nevertheless, the poor quality of Blake’s registration of plate to paper no doubt comes as a surprise to most students of Blake. Publishers of reproductions of the illuminated books generally straighten the plates and usually trim to the image, because it is the image and not the artifact that is being reproduced. Even first-rate facsimiles, like those by the Blake Trust and Manchester Etching Workshop, align the images on the paper. Examining the originals themselves may not reveal much bibliographical information because many have been disbound and mounted in mats. For example, “The Fly” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy F is professionally matted to appear perfectly aligned (illus. 54), but lift the mat and you can see that the image is too low on the sheet (illus. 55). “The Little Girl Lost” in the same copy (illus. 56) is even more dramatically rescued by its mat; seen in its original condition, though, the image falls and slants to the left (illus. 57). Nor did the Blakes pay any more attention to the alignment of facing pages, such as frontispiece and title plate. In Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy F, neither those facing pages in Innocence (illus. 58) nor those in Experience are aligned, but for exhibition purposes they are matted to appear so (illus. 59).

Phillips claims that Blake used bottom-sheet registration for all his illuminated prints and not just the color prints (21). He acknowledges that some images are misregistered, but finds most of these in “early copies” and suggests that they evince the “constant attention” (21) required to register plates to bottom sheets. The problems with these observations are that the proportion of misaligned impressions can be more than 50% of the prints in many copies of Blake’s illuminated books, and that misaligned impressions appear in the vast majority of illuminated books Blake printed, both early (as the 1789 and 1794 impressions above demonstrate) and late. “Earths Answer” in Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy Z (c. 1825), for example, is one of many plates in this copy that is poorly aligned (illus. 60). The impressions in Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy V (c. 1818) are even more revealing. Nearly half the plates are misaligned, with plates falling as much as 1.15 cm. (“Laughing Song”) and slanting as much as 4 mm. (“The Little Girl Lost”). Such problems are visible throughout copy V, which also provides another kind of evidence that Blake did not use bottom sheets and was not concerned about following guide lines. Blake drew four lines in pen and ink around each plate to create a frame consisting of three bands of different widths. He drew the pen lines over pencil lines but rarely traced them exactly or erased them when visible (illus. 61), nor did he stay within the lines when applying his wash. Indeed, no frame in Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy V is precisely rendered: pencil marks were not adhered to, multiple pen lines form one framing line, corners are missing because lines did not meet, colors spill over lines, and the bands are not symmetrical (by as much as a 3 mm. difference) in width on all sides. The frames are not uniform in size, nor do they try to compensate for the poor registration of the plates, or try to create uniform margins among the pages. In short, the pencil guide lines, which are analogous to those on a bottom sheet, were either poorly followed or ignored altogether. Blake’s talent for following precisely his own guiding lines was never highly developed.

If Blake used bottom sheets to align his plates to his sheets of paper, then he was improbably sloppy either in making or following them. And if he knew that he was going to use bottom sheets, and going to adhere strictly to aesthetic and commercial conventions regarding image alignment, then why did he cut his sheets of copper to yield plates that were all different sizes and shapes? The plates of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, for example, vary from 11.0 x 6.3 cm. to 12.3 x 7.6 cm., and very few are perfect rectangles (i.e., with the same width at top, middle, and bottom, and same height at both sides). Engravers took great care to square their plates so the embossed platemark would be aesthetically pleasing, and publishers wanted uniform sized plates for their books for similar reasons. Fifteen of the plates Blake engraved for John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative, for example, vary only 4 mm. in width and height, which in turn made it easy for a printer to use a common bottom sheet for the print run. The fact that Blake’s copperplates are rarely perfect rectangles makes registration inherently difficult; even with careful registration, the uneven sides of the plates cannot be aligned with the edges of a rectangular sheet on all four sides. Nor can the plates be perfectly aligned to straight guide lines let alone to a shared bottom sheet. For instance, if all the different size plates were aligned to the same guide lines, then all the pages in the book would share at least one (top or bottom) identical margin at the expense of the other margins being overtly of different dimensions, but that is certainly not what we see in the illuminated books. Instead of fitting a series of plates to a uniform bottom sheet, Blake would have had to fit sheets per plate—that is, prepare custom-made bottom sheets. Such sheets would have been crucial in two-pull printing, because that actually involves four registrations (see below), which requires very precise guidelines and strict adherence to them.

Given all of these easily observed characteristics of the illuminated books, Phillips’ proposals about bottom-sheet registration ask us to believe that Blake had difficulty with a kind of registration that did not require exact alignment, the purpose being to position properly the plate on its sheet of paper (illus. 49), but could execute the enormously more difficult registration required of two-pull printing over 650 times with only one mistake.

A closer look at the use of bottom sheets is in order. The plate in illustration 62 lies on a sheet of Plexiglas under which lies a bottom sheet with bold guidelines. The alignment of the plate differs from its previous position, which is signified by the traces of ink on the Plexiglas along the edge of the plate. Placing the plate on or near the proper lines for a single pull is easy enough, and there is no penalty if the alignments are only approximate or if they differ slightly among impressions. But this method of registration is exceedingly complicated for two-pull printing and, when not precisely executed, has serious aesthetic consequences. It is easier to register paper to plate with pinholes because that is a one-step registration, no matter how many plates are used or where they are placed on the bed of the press. You always register the paper to the plate, not to the bed of the press, because the pinholes are in the metal plate itself. The holes were drilled into the plate before printing, so that the printer needed only to align the sheet to the plate with the four pinholes. A bottom sheet for two pulls, however, requires preparation time and four registrations as an essential part of the printing process. After the printer and the assistant mark the bottom sheet with guidelines, they must register the plate exactly to the markings; second, they must register the paper to at least two edges of the bottom sheet; third, after they remove the paper and plate from the press, they must return the plate for its second printing and again register it exactly to the markings on the bottom sheet; fourth, they must again register the paper exactly to the same edges of the bottom sheet. If during any one of these registrations the printer is off by as little as a hairline in any direction (e.g., directly on a guide line rather than next to it), the impression will be slightly out of focus or at the very least reveal the hairline discrepancy under magnification (illus. 18, 19, 20, 21).

It seems highly improbable that there would be no other poorly registered impressions in color-printed illuminated books, other than the print of “Nurses song” previously discussed. As noted, Phillips’ theory asks us to believe that Blake was amazingly skilled in registering each plate twice, to yield over 650 perfectly aligned impressions, something Le Blon, Jackson, and other commercial printers set up for multiple plate work could not do—and to reconcile this with the clearly observable fact that Blake was carelessly inexact in the registration of plate to paper. The two-pull hypothesis generates these kinds of inherent contradictions when considered in light of Blake’s characteristic practices as printer and artist, and, as we will see, when seen in the light of Blake’s theories of art.

Because the plates of an illuminated book are not uniform in size, and because the sheets of paper they are printed on are not exactly the same size, Blake could not have used the same bottom registration sheet for all plates in the same book. Could Blake have used a different, custom-made bottom sheet for each plate, or sheets with guide lines to accommodate various sizes of plates? No, for the reasons given above: their presence would be revealed in better alignment of plate to paper than we find in Blake’s work, and this more exacting alignment would be replicated in all other impressions pulled from the plate in the same press run. Even if we abandon the idea that Blake printed multiple impressions from each plate and assume for the sake of argument that he printed only one impression before moving on to another plate, we would still expect sheets that were aligned to bottom sheets to have images registered more precisely to the printed sheet than we can observe throughout the illuminated books. We would also have to explain the waste of a great deal of paper to create many bottom sheets. And we would be forced to embrace the now-discredited theory that Blake produced his books per-copy rather than per-plate, one at a time rather than in small groups, and embrace also all the economic and practical inefficiencies that entails. While in principle registering paper and plate to a bottom sheet appears to work well for the production of one impression, the procedure becomes hopelessly complicated in practice when any one plate is printed more than once, when it is part of a series, and when numerous impressions are pulled from it. The technique breaks down by its own clumsiness and inefficiencies that produce no aesthetic gain.

If ignoring the evidence that Blake printed per-plate rather than per-book is not reasonable, then is it reasonable to suggest that Blake used a bottom sheet exclusively for color printing? Putting aside the thorny issue of Blake abandoning his direct mode of printing for a highly mechanical one for two or three years, the answer is still no. The same features noted above—impressions poorly registered to sheet edges and no shared margins within a book or among impressions from the same plate/bottom sheet—are true of color prints.

The presence of diverse margins among pages in the same book, as well as in impressions from the same plate in the same printing session, reveals that Blake did not waste paper for bottom sheets but instead “eyeballed” the paper to the plate, which is still a common practice today. Given what we have seen of William and Catherine Blake’s skill at registering paper to plate and their apparent disregard for mechanical precision, it is hard to believe either of them would have put the effort into, or succeeded every single time but one at, these numerous registrations. For impressions printed recto/verso, such as those in Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy E, the paper would have been registered eight times and passed through the press four times. It is difficult to envision a more complex and inefficient method for producing color prints.

Phillips speculates that Blake could have used the roller of the press to pin the sheet of paper down, holding it in place, while the plate was removed, worked on, and returned to its place, which could have been indicated either on a bottom sheet or by two metal weights forming a corner where the plate was placed. According to Hayter, who used this method in his Atelier 17, the “position of the plate was marked with great precision on the bed of the press” and a “longer than usual . . . sheet of paper” was required. Nevertheless, like other registration methods, this one was not absolutely precise, because “after only one pass through the press, the paper has become stretched in length, and even when dry will never return exactly to the length it once had; then again, owing to the slight displacement of the blankets as the roller passes over the thickness of the plate, the register cannot in theory be guaranteed to less than one-half of this thickness” (58).

Blake would have encountered other problems with this method. The circumference of the upper wooden roller of the eighteenth-century press that was displayed at the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain as an example of the kind he most likely used is 71.4 cm. On such a press, at least 11 cm. of paper is beneath the blankets and the curvature of the roller when the margin of the sheet is held in place by the roller. At least 5 cm. of the paper is completely covered by the roller and blankets. To use this method of registration, Blake would have had to use sheets at least 22.5 cm. long and place the plate under the curvature of the roller. Slipping the plate in and out of such a tight fit cannot be done without the paper touching the top edge of the plate as you return it to its place. But Blake’s sheets for the color-printed copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience were approximately 18.5 x 12.5 cm., which means Blake could not have used this method because there would not have been enough paper for the roller to grip. Plates like the Experience title plate, at 12.4 x 7.2 cm., provided top and bottom margins of only 3 cm. Nor could he have used this method for There is No Natural Religion, copies of which were rudimentarily color printed in two colors on paper approximately 14 x 11 cm. As Hayter notes, the method required “a sheet of paper rather longer than usual” (58). Given the small sizes of Blake’s paper, gripping the sheet in place with the roller is the least likely way that Blake could have proceeded. Even with a somewhat smaller roller, as in modern presses (which range between 63 and 68 cm.), the hold-under-the-roller method still wouldn't work for printing on the paper sizes Blake used.

Holding the sheet in place with a metal weight and indicating the plate’s position by two weights forming a corner is equally inexact, particularly for small sheets of paper and small plates. This technique is more suitable for large plates, the size of America or larger, where a 1 mm. misregistration is less noticeable since it is a smaller percentage of the whole. With a small plate, even a slight misregistration is noticeable.