Since 1879, Hatch Show Print has run a letterpress shop in continuous operation, making it one of the oldest working letterpress shops in the United States, and you can watch the presses at work here. The Hatch brothers founded the shop to print circus posters and theatrical handbills, and in the decades that followed, Hatch became the premier poster printer for country music shows, the Grand Ole Opry, and Nashville entertainment more broadly. The shop's visual style — bold typefaces, bold colors, woodblock imagery, and an aesthetic that owes as much to nineteenth-century trade printing as to twentieth-century graphic design — became inextricably associated with the visual identity of country music.
A Hatch Show Print poster is immediately recognizable. When the shop's survival was threatened in the 1980s, the Country Music Hall of Fame acquired it and moved it to this location inside the Hall's campus, where it continues to operate as a working print shop and tourist destination. You can watch printers pulling posters from the original presses, and you can purchase prints made from the same blocks and typefaces that Hatch has been using for over a century.
It is a living archive of American commercial printing.