A Look Back at Hatch Show Print’s History

A 1930s ad promoting Nashville’s Hatch Show Print.

The print shop’s first poster:  a 6-by-9-inch “dodger” announcing a speech by Henry Ward Beecher in 1883.

This Hatch Show Print poster was designed by Gail Anderson in 2013, featuring a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

A promotional poster for the Negro American baseball league in 1945.

Master print maker Jim Sherraden, 61, at Hatch Show Print. Sherraden is retiring after 34 years.

The shop’s current location is on the first level of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum building.

Huey, the shop’s cat.

Sherraden mixes ink for a print. The print shop makes more than 500 new posters and monoprints every year.

Sherraden applies ink to a block design before transferring it to paper.

The poster-making process can take up to 40 hours for each poster. Here, part of a vintage block advertising an event at the Grand Ole Opry is drying after the ink was transferred to paper.

Hatch Show Print created posters for many iconic musicians. This poster advertises an Elvis Presley concert in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1956.

This Johnny Cash poster was created by the print shop in the 1960s

A Hatch Show Print poster for a Bob Dylan concert with the Brian Setzer Orchestra at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium in 1999.

A 2004 R.E.M. poster.

One of Sherraden’s original monoprints, Aztec Plain, from the early 2000s.

Blocks carved for printing posters are stored on shelves in the back of the print shop.

Sherraden began making his “paper quilts” in 2012 when he started using his own wood blocks to create quilt-like patterns on paper. This one is #71.

Sherraden’s paper quilt #64.

Dozens of Hatch Show Print’s iconic posters and prints line the wall of the shop.