Prints made by Emil Orlik before 1900, the year in which he left Europe to travel to the Far East, cover a wide range of subject matter – portraits, family life, peasants working the land, landscapes, portraits and scenes from the Prague ghetto. They are also in a wide range of media – etchings, lithographs and woodcuts, many in colours.
Some of these prints e.g. Würfler( The Gambler) appeared in the art periodical PAN in 1897, together with works by such famous artists as Toulouse-Lautrec, Max Klinger and Käthe Kollwitz

A number of the early prints depict scenes and characters Orlik saw on his early travels in England , France and Holland. They formed, to a large part, a pictorial diary of the years from 1892 to 1900. They include such exquisite prints as Kopf eines hollandischen Mädchen’s in Haube(Head of a Dutch Girl with a Cap). His colour lithograph Aus Edinburgh was also published in PAN

He kept all his early woodblocks and in 1920 he published his celebrated portfolio Kleine Holzschnitte (Small woodcuts) in an edition of 115, which also contained the text of his descriptions of each of the prints. The portfolio contained 34 woodcuts, 18 of which were in colours. The complete portfolio is now very rarely found. It included such delightful items as Aus London and the superb colour woodcut Schneiderwerkstatt bei Orlik in Prag (The Orlik tailoring workshop in Prague) which depicted his father and colleagues busy sewing.