Hatch Show Print

Hatch Show Print traces to a Wisconsin print shop run by William Hatch, where his sons Charles and Herbert learned letterpress printing before the family relocated to Nashville in 1875. Four years later, in 1879, the brothers founded C.R. and H.H. Hatch; their first job was a handbill advertising a Nashville appearance by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher. To fill demand for circus, minstrel and vaudeville advertising, the shop cut its own oversized wood type -- fonts as tall as forty and eight inches -- to print billboard-scale posters.

The shop's best-known era came under William Hatch, Charles's son and a master woodblock carver, whose hand-carved images of touring performers became its signature. Working from behind the Ryman Auditorium from 1925 to 1992, the shop printed posters for Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway and other touring acts alongside routine commercial jobs for Nashville businesses. William Hatch died in 1952, and the business changed hands several times before Gaylord Entertainment donated it to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 1992.

Now housed at 224 Rep. John Lewis Way South, Hatch Show Print continues to operate as a working shop rather than a static exhibit, hand-setting wood and metal type to produce an estimated 500 to 700 different print jobs a year and drawing more than 100,000 visitors annually who watch posters being pulled on the same presses the shop has used for generations.