I have sold a lot of limited edition prints through galleries as well. The galleries seem to me to mostly use the concept to be able to talk about value and they have tried to use it as an incentive to buy a print early in the edition while it is cheap and going to go up in price later. It is just a sales game they play if you ask me. I don't know if it works unless you are established and your prints are obviously going to continue to sell. I was talked into limiting mine to 50 and my best seller only ever made it up to about 20.
I have a friend here who sold a lot of prints through ebay and wanted to have the artistic sounding edition type number without limiting his ability to sell forever, so he started just numbering his prints without a limit number. I actually like that idea once I got over the phoniness of it because it is interesting to know how many prints have sold and how "vintage" the print might be.
At one point I was in several galleries and sold a lot of prints with edition numbers on them and was forever losing track of where I was in the numbering so I would estimate up the number up to be safe. That was stupid. I am probably still that stupid.
I was looking through a catalog of Edward Weston prints the other night and was surprised to see that several of his older prints have edition numbers on them. He seemed to edition his prints to 30 when he was still making platinum prints.
In the future (and I am working on quite a body of new work) I am going to refuse to edition my prints but I am going to just number them and try to keep track of that. My life span is limiting enough.
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