Hatch Show Print

Hatch Show Print was founded in 1879 by two brothers, Herbert and Charles Hatch, who set up a letterpress printing operation in downtown Nashville and began producing handbills, circus posters, and vaudeville bills for the region's entertainment industry. Over the following century the shop became the de facto printer for Nashville's music world, producing concert posters for the Grand Ole Opry and every significant touring act that passed through Tennessee. The shop's aesthetic — bold woodblock type, high-contrast imagery, colours printed in layered passes — became so thoroughly associated with American country music's visual culture that the two are now inseparable.

Posters for Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Bill Monroe, and virtually every other major act of the 20th century were produced here, often in small runs on cheap paper never intended to survive. The ones that did survive are now collectors' items; the printing blocks for the ones that didn't form one of the most extraordinary archives of American commercial printing in existence — thousands of carved wooden letters and image blocks, each one a record of an event that someone once needed the world to know about. The shop kept almost everything.

Hatch Show Print has operated continuously for more than 140 years under various owners. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum acquired it in 1992 and in 2013 relocated it to the museum's building at 224 Fifth Avenue South, where it continues to print using the original wooden and metal type, the original presses, and the original visual approach. Tours take visitors through the working print shop. Custom posters can be commissioned. Walking in is to understand what the printing of popular culture looked like before design software made hand-craftsmanship redundant — and to see that the craft still produces something that software cannot.