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The July/August 1968 issue (56:4) had a 34-page feature by Donald J. Karshan called “American Printmaking, 1670-1968.” Bound into this issue was a color lithograph by Larry Rivers, which had been printed by the New York office of the famous Paris firm the Atelier Mourlot in the enormous edition of forty-six thousand copies.

A year and a half later, beginning in January/February 1970 (58:1), Art in America published six more commissioned color lithographs by Paul Jenkins, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Alexander Calder, Peter Dechar, Ray Parker, and Robert Rauschenberg. The editions of these prints ranged from fifty thousand at the beginning to sixty-five thousand at the end. In an introduction to the Jenkins print in January/February (58:1), Mr. Karshan wrote: “This direct transmittal from artist to collective ownership is, in my opinion, not only true to the original and broad purposes of graphic art, but is as contemporary a use of the multiple as we can achieve at this time.”

The same article gives a thorough description of the production of these prints. First, the artists created them as conventional lithographs in the workshops of Mourlot, Irwin Hollander, and other lithographers. Then, the large editions bound into the magazine were produced through an ingenious and unconventional application of offset lithography. Art in America published one hundred portfolios containing all six of the original prints “directly hand-pulled from the original stones or plates” and signed and numbered, at the price of $600 ($500 before Dec. 31, 1970). These years, it must be remembered, were the heyday of multiples, posters, and assembled art periodicals like Aspen and S.M.S.