[drcy]

In the artworld, prints are considered 'original' (handmade as I call them), if the graphics are made directly by hand or handheld tool into the printing plate, and the print is printed directly from that printing plate. If you hancarve a block of wood and print from that block, you made an original, handmade print. It's the printing equivalent of an original painting or sketch, and if you buy a thousands dollar Picasso lithograph or Rembrandt etching, that's what you are getting.

An example is if your kid makes a linoleum cut print in art class, where you carve the design into a piece of linoleum, ink it up and print it onto a piece of paper. That's an original. If you scan it or photograph and print out a digital copy, that's a reproduction.

In the late 1800s, there was the modern way of reproducing photographs, sketeches and paintings by translating the original art in to a dot-matrix pattern. They take a photo of the sketch or painting, and make the reproduction on the printing plate with that. That's the way modern baseball cards, CD covers, posters, newspapers and magazines reproduce graphics. And if you look under a microscope, you will see the dot pattern.

Before this process, newspapers and magazines couldn't reproduce photos or paintings that way, and so all the graphics in publications are orignal, handmade works of art.

So photographs have been around since 1839, but the in practice technology to realistically reproduce them didn't start until the 1890s. The first photomechanically reproduced baseball card is the 1893 Just So Tobacco. The 1880s and earlier 1880s Allen & Ginters, Red Stocking Tobacco and trade cards are handmade prints.