The dusty print shop on Broadway stands like a crochety old craftsman next to the sleek, corporate Kinko’s down the street. When customers come to Hatch Show Print, their posters get run on greasy, battered machines that have more in common with Johannes Gutenberg’s first press than the graphics software, laser printers and high-speed copiers of today.
But what Hatch Show Print lacks in microchip muscle, it makes up for in attitude and tradition. Through a dozen decades, Hatch has created distinctive posters for Negro League baseball and traveling magicians, minstrel shows and opera singers, gas companies and B-movies – and in the process, helped spread Southern culture throughout America as the broadsides were pasted on barns and brick walls.
Its entertainment client list reads like a music hall of fame: Among the hundreds are Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Flatt and Scruggs, Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, the Byrds and the Rolling Stones, along with just about every crooner and strummer who graced the Grand Ole Opry while it was housed around the corner at Ryman Auditorium.
The oldest surviving letterpress shop in the nation, Hatch was founded in 1879 by a pair of Wisconsin brothers. It is operated today by the Country Music Foundation, in part as a museum though it is still every bit the thriving business. Modern-day musicians and other customers who treasure Hatch’s signature style keep it going, for while computers can do almost anything with graphics, only an old-fashioned press with hand-carved block letters can produce that scruffy, antiquated Hatch look.
“It’s the tortoise and the hare story,” said Jim Sherraden, Hatch’s manager, print designer, historian and a 13-year veteran of the shop. “Because of the incredible influence of the computer, we seem to get more popular.”
The list of modern musical and corporate names associated with Hatch continues to grow. Bruce Springsteen, the Beastie Boys, Spin Doctors, the Lollapalooza festival and Jack Daniels whiskey are among the many who have been immortalized on Hatch prints; the cover for the “Emmylou Harris Live at the Ryman” compact disc is also a Hatch creation.
“I really admire what Jim is doing down there,” said John Upchurch, owner of Chicago’s Fireproof Press. The onetime guitarist with the Coctails first walked into Hatch in 1993 during a Lollapalooza tour stopover. “We went in and were blown away. Hatch has an incredible sense of history, an incredible collection of old type.” It also apparently exerted some artistic influence; the following year, Upchurch started his letterpress operation.
To Sherraden — an English major and songwriter who became smitten with Hatch after he was hired to write its history — the shop’s massive, 56-by-16-foot storage shelves represent a memory bank of sorts. The contents range from jumbo saloon-style fonts to a carved block featuring an image familiar to most Chicagoans. The figure of a Native American on horseback drawing a bow is immortalized in one of the bookend sculptures that grace the Grant Park entrance on Congress Parkway. (The block may have been used to advertise an exhibit by the sculptor, Ivan Mestrovic.)
Hatch has about 10,000 maple and basswood blocks and photoplates (used to transfer photographic images onto posters) on hand. Most Hatch posters get made from these original blocks, though some custom orders require Sherraden to carve new ones based on Hatch designs. In theory, a modern-day client could wind up using the same letters on a poster as Elvis or Minnie Pearl did.
“You’re walking in a big mainframe, and you have to know what’s inside to create the best poster designs,” Sherraden said. Only he knows where almost everything is, and that knowledge is locked in his head. “It’s great job security,” he mused.
Over the decades, many of the old blocks have been sold to private collectors, while others met a more practical fate: “Most of our shelving has been carved out of `obsolete’ wood blocks from minstrel shows and vaudeville acts,” Sherraden said.
According to Sherraden, fewer than five letterpress print shops now operate nationwide. Letterpress technology, a technique in which raised wood surfaces are inked and pressed against paper, traces its roots directly to Gutenberg’s movable type press of 1455. Letterpress was modernized in 1827, then replaced by a succession of innovations, including the Linotype, offset press, silk screening and desktop publishing.
Hatch was founded by Charles and Herbert Hatch, two enterprising brothers who set up shop in Nashville to capitalize on the city’s burgeoning print trade. Together they coined the slogan “Advertising without posters is like fishing without worms.”
From the start, the Hatch brothers relied on oversized lettering and bold layouts to establish their stylistic imprint. When Charles’ son William T. Hatch took over in the mid-1920s, the shop began tapping into the growing country music market. The younger Hatch and his successors kept meticulous business records, which later became an archive for music historians documenting the tours of stars on the rise — including bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe and a young rockabilly singer from Tupelo, Miss., later crowned the King.
Will Hatch died in 1952, about the time offset presses were beginning to squeeze letterpresses out of business. But the shop was profitable and the machinery paid for, so Hatch Show Print continued under a succession of owners. It was operated for a time in the 1970s and 1980s by the family of former Grand Ole Opry manager Jim Denny.
Hatch eventually was acquired by Gaylord Entertainment, current owner of the Opry, and then donated to the Country Music Foundation in 1992. At that time, construction of a Bell South office tower forced Hatch to move to its fourth and current location at 316 Broadway, a century-old building that once housed a furniture store (and was only 60 feet away from the previous shop). As a goodwill gesture, Bell South helped foot the moving bill. Hatch today stands on Music City’s main tourist drag, not far from Planet Hollywood, the honky tonks and a new, racecar-themed eatery.
Sherraden allows two small concessions to technology at Hatch. Orders come in through a fax machine, and a cordless phone allows him to talk to clients while preparing the presses for another run — or greeting the estimated 10,000 tourists who visit the shop annually (including Chris Schuba, who recently stopped in and ordered Hatch posters for the Chicago music club Schubas).
But what still stands out are the shop’s eccentric touches. Poster samples past and present cover the walls; letters, paint cans and compact discs are scattered everywhere, making Hatch resemble a teenager’s bedroom more than a place of business. Behind the counter, a five-tiered bird cage houses two tiny zebra finches. One of the birds has a penchant for breaking out, which has been known to stir things up on busy work days.
In the work area, the post-modern ragtime of Squirrel Nut Zippers played on a boom box as 20-year-old Nathan Lane applied yellow paint to the rollers of a 1950s-vintage vander Cook Universal I press. In a tradition started in the mid-’80s, musicians from Ricky Skaggs to Dave Alvin have scrawled their names all over the machine’s weathered, battleship-gray apron.
Lane was preparing 400 posters for the Derailers, a Sire Records group. It was tedious work; the 14-by-22-inch prints had to be fed into the press one at a time for a coat of red paint, then left to dry overnight on tall metal racks before getting yellow detailing.
Lane clipped a half-finished poster to a roller and turned a giant hand crank, causing the sheet to disappear into the press like paper spooled through a typewriter. Just ahead of the print, the wet paint rollers slipped across the wood blocks with a loud, mechanical hiss.
He removed the sample and surveyed his work. “These posters are not going to line up perfectly,” Lane said, adjusting the wood block frame with a metal turnkey. “But that’s part of the look. Some of these letters are 100 years old. The hardest part is just getting everything even, so the letters print cleanly. Once you have that, it’s not so bad.”
But a little smudge or skew doesn’t hurt the poster’s character. Hatch’s growing legion of fans, in fact, includes people known for being print perfectionists.
“Graphic designers come in and they’re amazed that we still do it by hand,” Sherraden said. Many ask if they can jump behind the counter for a few hours. “We joke that we ought to charge a therapy fee for people to come in and put an apron on.”
