FALL 2022 QUARTERLY EDITION Hatch Direct from Nashville

Bumping Elbows with Ghosts

Nashville’s legendary letterpress print shop was founded by the brothers Hatch in 1879 and remains the living heartbeat of classic American poster design. Since the early days of our Quarterly Editions, we knew that to explore the history of American printing, publishing and design, we were going to have to collaborate with Hatch Show Print.

“Bumping Elbows with Ghosts” is a short film we shot at Hatch Show Print while this collaboration was on press. We explored their amazing archives, learned a ton, and for the most part, managed to stay out the way.

Pressing Issues

Hatch is known for letterpress-printed posters. For many years, they’ve found ways to recombine their enormous archive of historic images and type in ways that always seem fresh and vibrant, but also timeless. Hatch makes large posters. We make small notebooks. Here’s how we worked together:

We imagined a three-poster public service campaign about effective poster design, which we named Pressing Issues: A Series on Ink, Paper, and Muscle. We wrote some copy and made a couple of really rough sketches and the left it to the crew at Hatch to design and print.

And. They. Killed. It.

Next, we cut up the three finished posters into covers for our Fall Memo Books. Each poster yielded six covers, and we included one book from each poster in the 3-Packs.  As a result of that, and the natural variations in letterpress printing, there’s a ton of variety in the run.

The covers are on Domtar Cougar 100-lb white cover stock with a brute-force application of a variety of hand-mixed Kennedy oil-based inks, including “Just About Pantone 637.” The body pages are ruled in light blue on a smooth 60-lb text stock from Finch.