Nashville: Hatch Show Print

The first thing my dad and I planned when we decided to go to Nashville was to take a tour of Hatch Show Print. Started in 1879 by the Hatch brothers, Hatch Show Print is a letterpress shop most famous for its concert posters for Johnny Cash, Elvis, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and pretty much everyone that has ever performed at the Grand Ole Opry or the Ryman Auditorium.

I have known about Hatch about as long as I have been interested in graphic design and I adore their style. They emphasize "preservation through production," which means that they do not add to their wood type collection and they use everything they have in their collection to create all of their posters. None of the design is done digitally—from a hand sketch, to the final letterpressed poster, computers are never a part of the process.

The tour wasn't much of a tour in the traditional sense, since you can see most of their one-room, glass-walled shop just by walking by. Hatch moved to its current space in 2013 when a custom shop was built specifically for them in the same building as the Country Music Hall of Fame (which Hatch has been a part of since 1992).

Pretty much everything in the shop is part of their collection and moved with them, including the shelves that hold the wood type (some of which are made of discarded printing blocks). The guides were informative and I learned a lot about the shop's history, which I find endlessly fascinating.

We then got to actually print our own poster (the orange type portion—everything else was pre-printed and each ink color takes 24-hrs to dry) which was unexpected and a great souvenir. Of course they also have a gift shop with actual souvenirs like posters, cards, t-shirts and mugs, in which I tried my best to restrain myself but still left with four posters, a t-shirt, a few postcards and—the holy grail of all souvenirs—a squished penny.