Laura Baisden and a few of Camp NeverNice's posters

Dan Brawner in his studio

“I knew the minute I said yes, I had changed my life forever.”

Laura Baisden sits next to her chipped gray printing press, a massive block of metal at the center of her Douglas Avenue storefront in East Nashville. She’s recalling a fateful night at Mickey’s Tavern when her bartender told her he had a line on a Vandercook, a reliable proofing press that’s become the machine of choice for many contemporary letterpress printers. On the wall, colorful show posters for Gillian Welch and Chris Stapleton make the 300-square-foot production shop into a gallery.

Like nearly all of Nashville’s letterpress community, Baisden learned how to print at Hatch Show Print, Nashville’s 143-year-old collection of blocks, type and institutional letterpress knowledge. Hatch is still a buzzing print shop, housed behind glass inside the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum downtown. It’s also a priceless archive of Nashville’s music history.

Hatch’s vast network of alums has gone on to help visually define the city, from Jackalope’s fairy-tale characters to Barista Parlor’s cartoon machines. They’ve pushed forward the once-uncertain future of a complicated way to print, finding their own presses in dusty basements and splitting off into printing branches across Tennessee and the country.

A century ago, presses were everywhere. Tabletop setups churned out in-house advertising in the backrooms of department and grocery stores. Every small town had a print shop. Nashville had a whole alley’s worth. Before the Fisk Jubilee Singers or Nashville’s popular country show with a sweet-spot radio signal, the city made its name as a publishing capital, churning out Bibles and, steadily, music. Established publishing infrastructure combined with a natural entertainment sector, with musicians stopping to play venues on Jefferson Street or downtown on their way back east or out west. Whatever line items make up Nashville’s soul, printing has been its ledger.

“Raw materials and goods came in on the river, and news was made at the courthouse or Capitol,” explains Hatch shop manager Celene Aubry from the production floor. Nearby, a printer prepares a caution-tape-inspired poster run for a Men at Work show at the Ryman. “Nashville connected the whole country with its music and an art form. Hatch was in the ideal place to put a face to country music. The design has never left the shop — we leverage the collection, the wood type, and we carve new blocks every week.

“And never throw anything away.”

Movable type ruled for 500 years, from Johannes Gutenberg in 1455 to the mid-20th century. It yielded to today’s lasers and offset lithography through the 1960s and ’70s. Until print came under threat of extinction, Hatch was more or less a typical city print shop, notable for its focus on entertainment but not necessarily anyone’s cultural treasure. In its heyday, the shop printed everything from show posters for bluegrass legend and Grand Ole Opry mainstay Bill Monroe to the racist minstrel shows that passed off satirized depictions of Black people as entertainment. Posters for big stars like Elvis and Johnny Cash were less common — they could sell out shows with their names alone and didn’t need Hatch for advertising.

It won prestige by surviving while advanced technology closed shops across the country. The Ryman, Hatch’s signature client, closed its doors in 1974. Hatch’s downtown time capsule of blocks and type stayed mostly intact, operating as a press-for-hire for spaghetti suppers, filling various advertising needs of Broadway’s adult entertainment industry and, rumor has it, printing McDonald’s coupons.

Jim Sherraden, a fixture at Hatch from the 1980s until he passed the reins to Aubry in 2019, helped the shop pivot from near obsolescence. He moved to Nashville in 1977 to write music and found Hatch.

“In late winter 1984 a Vanderbilt art teacher told me, ‘You have to see this dying old show-poster print shop before it goes out of business,’ ” says Sherraden. “I needed that shop as much as that shop needed me.”

Detailed Hatch histories are everywhere, from Scene contributor Jennifer Justus’ 2017 ode to the analog way of doing things for The Bitter Southerner to a CNN travel piece the same year. Anchored by Sherraden’s historiography, Hatch has published books on shop history aided by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which absorbed Hatch, its presses and its archive a decade ago. Around that time, Scene arts editor Laura Hutson Hunter checked in with Nashville’s letterpress clique for a cover story. Many had strong connections to Hatch, but each also had a new branch complete with individual artistic identities constantly wrestling with the constraints of an infinitely technical medium.

Artists credit Hatch as a master class in production. Employees see the process through from conception to printing, giving each designer a dose of artistic freedom within the Hatch mold. A core component of letterpress work is the mentor-apprentice relationship — and with it the implication that students will eventually outgrow instruction. This dynamic preserves strong relationships and debts within Nashville’s letterpress world, a vast web of printers that stretches back and forward in time and across the city, state and country.

In many ways, Hatch is the perfect training ground for young artists. It became wildly popular in the 2000s and rekindled its working relationship with the Ryman, which reopened in the early ’90s. The logistical pressures of turnaround combined with an unrivaled collection of type shape artistic output. A library of prints means history and legacy. It can also mean 143 years of subtle expectations about the way things are done, constraints for young artists finding their style: lots of stars, bars, a few colors, a simple clear image, sunbursts, and big, clear woodblock type. Many cite formative hours on Hatch presses after 5 p.m., when shop work jobs give way to personal projects.

“I was pushing against it and trying to stay at the same time,” remembers Baisden. “I probably would have worked there forever, but I had outgrown something. It was eight years of some of the best training I could get. And I didn’t want to waste that.”

Three months after Baisden left Hatch, she made the Vandercook deal at Mickey’s and launched her print shop, Camp Nevernice. She took her press to Knoxville in 2015, where a letterpress friend, Julie Belcher, agreed to house it and share her collection of type. She moved back to Nashville a couple years later with a few drawers of type.

Baisden is trained as an illustrator, and her work draws focus to colorful imagined scenes rather than text. Her intricate portraits of old cars and diving ducks represent show posters’ evolution from economical advertisements to artistic canvases. She sometimes relies on a three- or four-color reduction, a cumbersome process that gradually erases a linoleum block and guarantees a limited run. She prints enough to keep her shop open and works other jobs on the side. Business ebbs and flows with the seasons. 

Laura Baisden and a few of Camp NeverNice's posters

Legends swirl about Kevin Bradley, who left Hatch in the mid-1990s to piece together his own trove of type. His seed money was the door charge from a show at 12th & Porter — Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle, both of whom he’d done a lot of printing for while he was at Hatch. Bradley and Belcher, then partners, pulled from some of the biggest collections in the country, including former Hatch rival Southern Poster in Atlanta. The two operated presses and a robust internship program in Knoxville as Yee-Haw Industries until 2012. The partnership ended and they split their collection, with both moving on to new enterprises: Church of Type in California for Bradley and Pioneer House, a Knoxville vintage store with letterpress service, for Belcher.

“Every time you open a new thing, you want to give it a new name — that way you’re not constrained by the last thing,” Bradley tells the Scene. He credits Hatch for being his graduate school, equipping him with a printer’s skills and passion. But his approach, he says, is obsession with constant reinvention, finding and pushing the boundaries of ink and blocks. He is Hatch in relief.

Bradley recently moved his type and presses back to East Tennessee, where he’s printing as the Voodoo Rocket Institute of Advanced Typographic Research. Unlike the typical Hatch show print, with margin justification and a clear message, Bradley’s work is a kaleidoscope of colors and text. He prints images on top of each other, hand-stamps blocks and pulls huge canvases, observing only letterpress’s central constraint: Ink paints block, and block presses paper.

A few blocks from the Country Music Hall of Fame, Bryce McCloud runs Isle of Printing, which designs and prints show posters but also everything else — like the cartoons that brand Barista Parlor and the wall of multicolored cans lining Pinewood Social’s bowling alley. Though the Scene has spoken with McCloud on many occasions, he couldn’t be reached for this story in time for publication — he’s in the Blue Ridge Mountains teaching at the Penland School of Craft, a century-old fine arts institution with its own storied history.

After a few years at Hatch, Chris Cheney and Nieves Uhl started Sawtooth Press in an East Nashville backyard in 2012. Uhl had buckets of unsorted type recovered from a tornado near Dickson. While helping prominent Nashville sculptor Alan LeQuire at his sculpture studio, Cheney spotted a Vandercook collecting dust in a corner and proposed a trade. LeQuire had picked it up in the mid-1990s for $100.

“I have a little print shop in the basement of my studio,” says LeQuire. “My old buddy Jim Sherraden let me know when there was a sale happening at an old print shop in East Nashville. They were selling off their presses.”

LeQuire still has a Vandercook in his shop, a bigger model that he says weighs close to 6 tons.

Cheney traded him an etching press and printed with Uhl for six years, bouncing from Cheney’s backyard to a brick-and-mortar shop on Gallatin Avenue to The Hill Creative Collective, a shared arts space on Dunn Avenue near the fairgrounds. Sawtooth ran an internship program and organized community art events. They experimented with reduction prints too, sometimes incorporating bright neon ink. Cheney’s stylized animal characters make Jackalope Brewing Company six-packs into fairy-tale tapestries. Uhl’s limited-run two-color “Up to No Good in Inglewood” prints are cult hits.

“We didn’t see it as a failure — we got to run a letterpress shop for six years, that’s a success,” says Uhl. “One of the best things about doing it for yourself is you get to do it exactly how you want to do it. It’s really fun to see what people are doing knowing what they’ve done at Hatch. To see how they’ve grown and see what they’re doing on their own.”

Cheney just got back on the press for the first time in four years. He’s printing a job for The Educators’ Cooperative, a teachers’ professional development organization affiliated with the University School of Nashville. A few years ago, he started teaching art at USN, where his Vandercook now lives. Uhl is organizing a new print shop in her two-car garage. She plans to call it Two-Car Print Shop, and hopes to start offering workshops this winter.

The branches of Nashville’s letterpress scene extend past Tennessee. Emily Sokolosky interned at Hatch before setting up in West Virginia as Base Camp Printing Co. Her jobs include show posters for West Virginia Public Radio’s Mountain Stage. Brad Vetter spent almost a decade at Hatch before leaving for Illinois and eventually Louisville, Ky., where he now runs a print shop and studio. While at Hatch, he recruited Uhl, whom he’d trained with at Western Kentucky University as a graphic designer. He’s printed for artists like Jason Isbell, Waxahatchee and John Prine. He printed for Shawn Mendes’ world tour in 2019. His prints are distinct, thanks to their bright colors, playful patterns and simple shapes.

“I also try to make protest posters that respond to what’s happening in the world,” says Vetter. “I’ve always loved the democratization of printmaking. It feels like part of the responsibility of having a press is using it for good.”

Like any ancient art, letterpress comes with its own lore. Printers say owning gear is a blessing and a curse. An albatross. Drawers of lead type and wood type are heavy, and require strict organization. Letterpress equipment maintenance is a niche within a niche, specialized knowledge about arcane, complex machines. They also weigh a lot; Baisden’s Vandercook is 1,600 pounds. Old type wants to be inked, and a press left collecting dust is a type of karmic imbalance.

“I feel almost superstitious about it,” says Baisden. “I want to get my press and type from someone I know. All of this stuff has so much history, it’s like you’re being entrusted with the next leg of a journey.”

Printers seldom turn down a good deal or an intriguing lineage. At the urging of printmaker and art professor Cynthia Marsh, Austin Peay’s art department acquired a massive amount of letterpress equipment in 1997. Marsh estimates that the collection includes around 100,000 blocks of wood type, formally called the Goldsmith Press and Rare Type Collection. The acquisition was in the Hatch orbit — Jim Sherraden tipped off Marsh’s husband about the opportunity — and Marsh oversaw the collection until her retirement from APSU in 2020. Current Hatch director Celene Aubry is a collaborator.

“I see handset wood type as being the voice of the people — the last bastion of democracy — the democratic multiple,” Marsh tells the Scene via email. “I put few restrictions on the students’ use of the letterpresses and the wood type collection.”

Mark Hosford, a printmaking art professor at Vanderbilt University, attributes some of the letterpress buzz he’s noticed among students to slow-down culture. “Constraints are a better way to learn to be creative than having limitless possibilities,” Hosford tells the Scene. Vanderbilt acquired its single Vandercook from The Arm, a letterpress dealer in Brooklyn, a couple of years ago for an undisclosed sum. “Students still enjoy the tactile process and the hurdle of working with a physical object. It makes them slow down. It takes time. You have to really know what you want to say and be determined to say it.”

Chris Cheney got into printing as a TSU student, mostly silk-screen and etching, and quickly found Hatch. Fisk University has a rich history of book production but no letterpress, according to art professor Holly Hamby. There is a rich history of Black printers in letterpress and in Nashville, even though Nashville’s scene is predominantly white. Today some of the country’s best-known printers are Black. Amos Kennedy is a towering figure in letterpress and works out of Detroit. Nashville artist Ted Jones, formerly a Fisk art professor, features woodblock prints in his portfolio.

Belmont University has a Vandercook too, overseen by longtime Nashville artist Dan Brawner. He met Sherraden when both were students at MTSU, where art professor Kathleen O’Connell oversees an extensive printing program. Brawner sees the popularity of letterpress among students as a rebellion against phones and computers, a discovery of something inconveniently slow and forcefully meditative. His post at Watkins College of Art and Design turned into a post at Belmont when it acquired Watkins in 2020.

“Students are fascinated by these earlier processes,” says Brawner from his basement studio. “They can mash up digital and analog. It’s slow, tedious, and you can teach the whole history of type, space and graphic design.”

Dan Brawner in his studio

Brawner’s art has slowly gravitated from illustration (he did Scene covers in the 1990s) to printing with a tabletop press at his home in West Meade. On a recent trip to Mexico, he got a peek into the Mexican printing community, which has its own legends, mentors, machinery and type. Brawner’s projects are love letters to Nashville, like two Ed’s Fish & Pizza House posters and portraits of three old Nashville political cartoonists, part of a larger job with Bryce McCloud for Noelle, a downtown hotel abutting Printers Alley, now a tourist vein feeding onto Broadway. 

Here at Scene headquarters, a massive orange-and-yellow sign commemorates the 2014 Nashville conference of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia — a trade group for alternative-weekly newspapers like ours — titled “Sparkle and Twaang.” The letters are styled like massive wooden circus type. The whole poster is laser-printed, but it’s designed to look like a Hatch-style show poster, including fake nicks and divots, blank space that wouldn’t get inked on a press and therefore wouldn’t show up.

While the wood-type aesthetic strives to communicate authenticity to tourists at BNA and the Country Music Hall of Fame, letterpress stays breathing, connected by threads of shared obsession. New generations of interns and designers work behind glass on the perpetually busy production floor at Hatch, which kicks jobs to other local printers when its lead time gets too long. Bradley’s experiments and Baisden’s intricate scenes take the medium in different, slower directions. It’s the role of the academy to keep antiquated disciplines alive for their own sake. Each printer is building their own archives and safeguarding type and presses that will, eventually, merge or split further.

When we caught up, Baisden was printing posters for Nicefest, her shop’s long-delayed official opening on Sept. 1. Mint-green Gothic Condensed announces a full lineup of live music. Her space is too small for performances, but Santana, a concrete artist with an airy shop across the street, agreed to host.

Update: This story originally said the Hatch Show Print's collection was 153 years old. We corrected it to 143 years old. We regret the error.

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