Some 14 states have laws requiring Certificates of Authenticity (CoA) be provided to buyers of art; however: 1) There is not uniformity between the states as to what information is necessary. 2) The actual Certificates of Authenticity are generated by the artist or gallery; they are not issued by any governmental agency, nor are they approved by any agency. Please see Certificate of Authenticity.

Non-archival printing can see color shifts in even a few months. Three things go into archival printing: the quality of the paper support (acid and lignum free, preferably 100% cotton), light safe inks, and some kind of protective environment (starting with a UV inhibiting coating, then either safe storage or safe framing). If the colors fade away or the paper yellows and becomes brittle, or if the image is attacked by mold or insects, or simply gets dinged: it may not matter if you saved a few dollars. See Wilhelm-Research.

PDF files can be edited if there is no security preventing alterations. However, if the work was typeset in a program like InDesign or Quark, it is easier and safer to make alteration in those files and then recreating the PDF.

Please look at Copyright. Your work was automatically copyrighted upon its creation, but it was not registered. Publishing your work with a copyright notice offers additional protections and registering it provides the best protection under the law. Currently the basic fee is $35-45, and you can register on-line; or, you can submit Form TX (Literary Works) or Form VA (Visual Art Work) by mail. See US Copyright Office Forms.

Please look at Copyright: "Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents" are generally not eligible for copyright protection—but do not name your book the Further Adventures of Harry Potter.

Please look at Copyright. Generally: 1) Unpublished: works of authors who died before 1938 (life of the author plus 70 years). 2) Unpublished anonymous, pseudonymous, and works for hire created before 1888 (120 years from date of creation). 3) Published works before 1923. 4) Published in the US without copyright notice, created between 1923 and 1977. See Copyright Duration or Copyright Duration Table. There is a popular idea that you can use a small part of copyrighted work, sort of like fair use or musical sampling. A copyrighted visual work of art is fully protected and you can't use any of it.

No, the type should suit the book. However, there some general considerations: Serif type is much more readable than sans serif type. Sans serif and display types are fine for headings, and picture books where the text may be minimal, but longer works should be set in fairly traditional serif type. See Type, also Wikibooks.

Generally, in offset printing various factors (dot gain, reflectivity, opacity, etc) art work is printed on coated paper. For popular magazines, all the pages are coated. For art books, especially published before say 1970 (an arbitrary date) it was not uncommon for the art to be printed on coated paper and either tipped in (see tipped in or wrap around) to uncoated paper. Since then, most art books are printed on coated paper throughout, text and images.

I grew up watching Bennett Cerf (co-founder of Random House) on What's My Line?, both of my parents wrote, my mother won the Polk Award in 1974, and my family counted a number of well known authors and editors as friends. If your book were good, I'd would love to, but publishing, which should involve marketing and advertising, is an expense and commitment in time that I cannot give, and you would be disappointed. I have published books, in the sense of getting them into print, and I will again, but I do not represent myself as a publisher. Writers are too often prey to every scam under the sun, I won't contribute, even if unintentionally.

I have. It is exhausting and daunting to edit someone else's work. I believe that editing is a collaborative process, which works best if at the end of the day author and editor can share a single malt. If you think about the process and what would make it work best, it cannot be done for a fixed fee of $500 unless all you really want is to have the spelling checked and get a few glib comments like, "I liked the sentence, '. . .' and your plot development moved quickly, carrying me straight to the denouement. I couldn't put it down."

I've was asked to write a non-technical article about making digital collage. I've posted on this site, click here.