Project 007: Hatch Show Print
- Posted by: GOOD
- on November 24, 2007 at 5:56 pm
For Project 007 we asked you to send in documentation of a lost or endangered art. Our example was a letterpress print shop and, as it turns out, letterpress print shops have dominated the submissions as well. While we thought there’d be more variety, it’s been interesting to witness the tenacity of this particular low-tech, tactile art.
This latest submission is from reader Bob Gnaegy. He writes:
“Hatch Show Print is one of the oldest working letterpress print shops in America and is operated as a historical site and an active business. A working museum that continues the craft of letterpress printing, Hatch strives to preserve the history of the shop with an archive that includes type and woodblocks, posters and documents.
Hatch has been making entertainment posters, or ’show posters,’ in Nashville, Tennessee, since 1879. The talented craftspeople at Hatch continue to print and design posters that are distinctive and eye catching – the happy result of pressing hand-inked, hand-carved woodblocks, type and metal plates onto paper.”
DISCUSSION: 1 Comment
Although I do not have pictures to add to my submission, I can think of quite a lot of professions that are becoming a lost art. My dad was a pressman at a printshop, you know one of the guys who set the plates, measured the ink and supervised the printing. With the advent of scanners, digital printers and Kinko’s, this profession is quickly vanishing. As soap operas disappear, so do their writers. Another vanishing profession. Another lost art.As Julie Gaines, co-founder of Fish’s Eddy, laments, there are fewer and fewer producers of the sturdier American made china that she sells in her store. She once bragged of the craftsmanship of American dinnerware, saying that a stack of American-made plates were as stout as any stool. She often used them to stand on.But sadly, that’s a reoccuring story across the country, manufacturing jobs, skilled labor, evaporating at a breakneck pace. The truth is that the demise of these arts, crafts, professions, are not as insular as one might think. They are all around us.