A Glossary for Anyone About to Buy a Grands Boulevards Poster Print

A poster of the Grands Boulevards, on any shop page worth trusting, arrives with a short paragraph of vocabulary before the price is even given: chromolithograph reproduction, 300 gsm, deckle edge, edition of 200, signed proof. Buyers hesitate on the same words week after week. We are a studio that draws European cities from real geography, and we have learned that most first-time print buyers do not need a lecture on the Belle Époque poster or the railway commissions that built the form — they need the checkout terms defined, plainly, in the order they usually appear on the page. What follows is that walkthrough.

Lithograph

A lithograph is a print made from a flat stone or metal plate on which the image has been drawn in a greasy medium, then chemically fixed so that ink adheres to the drawn areas and water repels it from the blank ones. The word survives on shop pages long after the process has gone industrial, and it does two different jobs there. On an antique listing, "lithograph" usually means the sheet in front of you was pulled from the original stone in the era it depicts. On a contemporary listing, the same word almost always means the image was drawn as if for the stone — flat colour fields, hand-registered separations, no photographic tonal range — and then reproduced offset or digital. A Grands Boulevards image described simply as "a lithograph, Paris, 1900" is claiming to be antique; a "lithograph-style print" is claiming aesthetics, not provenance. We use the word only in the second sense, and we say so on the page. The rest of the checkout vocabulary follows from that one distinction.

Chromolithograph

A chromolithograph is a lithograph printed in more than one colour, each colour laid down from its own stone or plate in sequence. Before it became a household word it was a technical feat: producing a poster of a boulevard scene at scale meant separating the image into eight or twelve colour plates, then printing each one over the last with the sheet re-aligned by hand. That layered method is what gives Belle Époque posters their particular optical density — a red is not a printed red, it is a red laid over a warm pink laid over cream, each one visible if you look closely. On a shop page today, "chromolithograph reproduction" tells you the source image was built that way, or drawn to look as though it was. It is a claim about aesthetics and heritage rather than about the sheet in your hand. A studio drawing the Grands Boulevards from its actual street grid will often mimic three-to-five-colour chromo separations because that is what makes a city read as an image rather than a photograph.

Registration

Registration is the alignment of one colour layer with the next. In a chromolithograph pulled from stones, misregistration shows up as a red outline that sits half a millimetre off its intended edge, or a shadow tone that has drifted from the object casting it. Antique posters are prized, in part, for the small human wobble of their registration; contemporary reproductions are usually registered by machine to a tolerance the eye cannot see. The reason the word matters at checkout is that "hand-registered" or "hand-pulled" on a listing is a specific claim that a person, not a press computer, aligned the layers. It commands a price. On our own shop we register digitally and say so. A city like Amsterdam — drawn from its canal geometry rather than photographed — depends on tight registration to hold: if the water tone drifts off the canal edge, the whole image reads as a mistake rather than a drawing.

Colorway

A colorway is a specific palette in which a single image is offered. The same drawing of the Grands Boulevards might be sold in a "day" colorway — cream ground, muted terracotta rooflines, blue-grey sky — and a "dusk" colorway with an amber ground and deeper indigo overhead. The image is the same; the ink recipe is not. Colorway is not a synonym for "colour options": it names a considered, complete palette that the studio treats as a distinct edition. Buyers use the word without knowing it. When someone asks whether a print "comes in a warmer version", they are asking whether a warmer colorway exists. On our own listings a colorway is versioned and dated, so that a buyer returning in a year to order a second sheet can match the first one exactly rather than approximately. Chamonix, drawn beneath Mont Blanc, is a case where colorway matters more than most: the same peak reads very differently in a cool morning palette than in a warm afternoon one, and the studio has to choose.

Giclée

Giclée is a French word meaning, roughly, "spurt", and it is the term the fine-art print trade settled on in the early 1990s for high-resolution inkjet printing on archival substrates using pigment rather than dye inks. In practice it means the sheet was printed on a wide-format inkjet press capable of holding fine detail and a wide gamut, on a paper certified to resist yellowing and fading for decades under normal indoor conditions. Giclée is not a claim about how the image was made — it is a claim about how the sheet was output. A drawing done in the chromolithograph tradition can be printed giclée; so can a photograph. What the word buys you at checkout is longevity and colour fidelity, not artistic provenance. If a Grands Boulevards print is described as "giclée on 300 gsm cotton rag", that is a substrate-and-output claim: pigment inks, archival paper, museum-grade press. The aesthetic claim lives elsewhere on the page.

Grammage

Grammage is the weight of a sheet of paper expressed in grams per square metre — the "gsm" number in the product description. It is a proxy for thickness and stiffness, not a direct measurement of either, but it is the closest thing to a universal shorthand the trade has. A standard office sheet is 80 gsm. A magazine cover runs 200 to 250 gsm. A poster print worth framing usually sits between 250 and 340 gsm; below that, the sheet cockles under humidity and shows every bend from shipping. Above 340 gsm the paper starts behaving like card, which some studios prefer and others find heavy. Grammage does not, on its own, tell you the paper's character: two sheets at 300 gsm can feel entirely different depending on fibre content, coating and finish. It tells you the sheet has enough body to hang without sagging, and enough thickness to receive ink without bleeding through. That is the whole promise of the number.

Deckle Edge

A deckle edge is the soft, feathered, slightly irregular edge produced when paper is made in a mould rather than cut from a larger roll. On a handmade sheet the deckle is genuine — it is the fibre boundary where the pulp met the frame — and every sheet's edge is slightly different. On a machine-made "deckle-edge" sheet the edge is manufactured to look torn, which it does convincingly enough that most buyers cannot distinguish the two without a loupe. Both are legitimate; the difference is disclosure. Deckle edges matter at checkout because they change how the print is framed. A sheet meant to be shown deckle-out is floated inside the frame with a visible margin, so the irregular edge reads as part of the image. A sheet meant to be cropped can be trimmed to a clean rectangle and mounted flush. Buying a deckle-edge Grands Boulevards print without a plan for how to frame it usually leads to a second purchase — of a float-mount — a week later.

Bleed and Trim

Bleed is the printed area extending beyond the intended final edge of the image; trim is where the sheet is actually cut. Together they answer a question every buyer eventually asks without knowing the vocabulary: does the image go all the way to the edge of the paper, or is there a white border? A "full-bleed" print has ink to the trim line, with no margin. A "bordered" or "trimmed-with-margin" print leaves cream paper around the image, typically 15 to 40 mm on each side, which functions as a built-in mat when the sheet is framed. Neither is better; they are different framing decisions made before the sheet leaves the press. A boulevard image reads well full-bleed because the composition — long horizontals of façades, tramlines, awnings — wants to run off the sides of the sheet. A coastal image like the Amalfi Coast, where the horizon does most of the work, tends to want a border. The listing should tell you which decision was made.

Amalfi Coast The print from this article · from €29.95 View the print →

Edition Size

Edition size is the total number of sheets that will ever be printed of a given image in a given colorway. An "open edition" has no cap; the studio will print more whenever the previous stock sells through. A "limited edition of 200" commits, in writing, that once 200 sheets have shipped the plates are retired and no further copies of that image-and-colorway will be sold. The number is meaningful only if the studio honours it, which is why edition size is usually paired with a signed proof and a numbered sheet ("47 / 200" in the lower margin). Small editions — under 50 — are collector inventory and priced accordingly. Editions in the low hundreds are the working middle of the trade: rare enough to matter, common enough to actually reach the walls of buyers who want them. Open editions are the honest option when a studio is not prepared to retire an image; there is no shame in the format, but it should be named as what it is.

Signed Proof

A signed proof is a sheet from the edition marked in pencil, usually in the lower margin, with the artist's or studio's signature and, in most conventions, the sheet's number over the total. The pencil is not decorative — it is the standard because pencil cannot be reproduced by a press and cannot be lifted without visible damage, so its presence is evidence the sheet passed through a specific hand after printing. A signed proof at the checkout stage is doing three jobs at once. It authenticates the sheet as part of the stated edition. It anchors the edition to a named studio rather than an anonymous printer. And it commits the studio to the numbering: once you have sheet 47 of 200, the studio cannot quietly print a 201st. On a Grands Boulevards print, or on any image that could be reproduced widely and cheaply, the signed proof is the smallest, most concrete promise the shop page makes.

Amsterdam The print from this article · from €29.95 View the print →

FAQ

What is the difference between a lithograph and a giclée?

Lithograph describes how an image is designed and, historically, how it was printed — from a stone or plate in flat, registered colour layers. Giclée describes how a sheet is output today — on a pigment-ink inkjet press using archival paper. The two words answer different questions. A contemporary lithograph-style print of the Grands Boulevards is almost certainly output giclée. The listing should tell you both: the aesthetic tradition and the actual production method.

Is a heavier paper always better for a poster print?

No. Grammage above roughly 250 gsm is the threshold at which a sheet hangs and frames well without cockling; beyond that, more weight is preference, not quality. A 300 gsm cotton rag and a 340 gsm cotton rag will both frame beautifully. The paper's fibre content, finish and coating matter as much as the number. Ask about the substrate, not just the gsm figure.

Why does "colorway" matter if the image is the same?

Because the palette is part of the image, not a filter applied to it. A boulevard scene rendered in a cool grey-and-terracotta colorway reads as a winter afternoon; the same scene in warm ochre reads as late spring. Buyers who match a print to a specific room usually care which one they are ordering. A studio that versions its colorways lets you re-order the exact one you already own, months or years later.

What does "edition of 200" actually commit the studio to?

It commits the studio, in writing on the listing, to printing no more than 200 sheets of that specific image in that specific colorway. Once 200 have shipped, the file is retired and no further copies of that combination are sold. The image may still exist in another colorway with its own separate edition. The number is only as meaningful as the studio's willingness to honour it, which is why signed and numbered proofs exist.

Do I need a deckle edge?

Only if you plan to float-mount the print so the edge is visible inside the frame. A deckle edge that is then cropped or hidden behind a mat is wasted — you paid for a feature you cannot see. Decide how the print will be framed before choosing between a deckle-edge sheet and a clean-trimmed one. Neither is more prestigious; they suit different framing choices.

Is a full-bleed print harder to frame than a bordered one?

Slightly. A full-bleed sheet has ink to the trim, so it needs either a mat that overlays the outer few millimetres or a frame sized to the exact sheet with no window mat. A bordered print has its own built-in margin and can be framed either flush to the image or with the margin showing. Neither is difficult; they are different framer conversations.

How can I tell whether a shop's "lithograph" is antique or contemporary?

Read the listing for a date and a provenance line. An antique lithograph will name the era and, ideally, the printer or publisher and its city. A contemporary reproduction will typically use the phrase "lithograph-style", "chromolithograph reproduction", or "in the tradition of" — and will name the substrate and output method (giclée on 300 gsm) rather than the era. If the listing is ambiguous on this point, treat it as contemporary until proven otherwise.

Where does your studio's own Grands Boulevards print sit in this vocabulary?

Ours is a contemporary drawing of the boulevard grid, output giclée on 300 gsm cotton rag, offered in dated colorways and in editions of 200 with signed and numbered proofs. It is a lithograph-style image, not an antique lithograph, and the listing on our shop says so in those words. Everything above is written so that when you reach the checkout page, none of it needs to be looked up.