Trolleys (Black and White)

The single most useful thing to establish about a Trolleys is which release it belongs to, because there are two and they are separated by a year, a palette and a considerable difference in edition size.

The black and white release is associated with Barely Legal, the Los Angeles show of 2006, and is the scarcer of the two: publicly circulated references put the signed edition at 150 and the unsigned at 500. The colour release followed in 2007 and is a much larger signed edition — saleroom catalogue descriptions routinely number it out of 750, which is unusually large for a signed Banksy of the period. Scarcity and price do not follow the palette in the way people assume, so the two need pricing separately rather than as variants of one thing.

The image is catalogued as Trolleys and known to a great many people as Trolley Hunters, and both names are in active use across salerooms, dealers and databases.

That is not a pedantic point. An owner searching under one name sees a different set of comparables from an owner searching under the other, and a work catalogued under the less common name in a sale can attract less attention than it should. When we look at comparable results for a Trolleys we look under both.

Reported figures on this site come from publicly circulated references rather than from primary records, and on this image that matters more than usual.

Reported edition sizes for Trolleys differ between reputable dealers, databases and auction catalogues, and some of that is genuine disagreement while some is the two releases being conflated into one row — which is exactly what this site's own reference table did until it was corrected. Where a figure matters to a decision, it should come from Pest Control and the publisher rather than from any secondary compilation, this one included.

The whole sheet including all four margins, not a crop of the image. The pencil line along the bottom edge, close enough to read the numbering and any proof marking. The signature if there is one. The publisher's blind stamp, which usually needs light raking across it to show. And the reverse.

Margins are where the money is on this print as much as on any other: a sheet trimmed down to fit a frame is catalogued as trimmed for the rest of its life and cannot be restored.