Hatch Show Print

Hey, all! Or should I say, y'all . . .

I'm nearing the end of my cross-country trek to Bloomington. Right now we're in Nashville, TN, watching "The Colbert Report" in our motel room.

But flash back to a few hours ago, when we were getting a gracious tour of the beautiful Hatch Show Print Shop, which has been making letterpressed concert posters and advertisements since 1879.

There was a little blurb about the shop in our Let's Go travel guide and then the Country Music Hall of Fame had a couple of displays of their work, both of historical handbills for artists like Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn, and, elsewhere in the museum, of their more current posters, for bands like Interpol and Modest Mouse. You can see a few samples HERE. Needless to say, we knew we had to go see it for ourselves.

We spent a little bit of time looking around in the front of the shop, and as I was standing at the register (I bought a reproduction Patsy Cline poster . . . Ruby, I know you'd be proud!), I finally got up the courage to ask if I could take a picture. From there, we got to talking about letterpress and they gave us a tour of the back. As you can see from the pictures below, it's a really beautiful shop, with shelves and shelves full of woodcut blocks, and what isn't used for storage space is papered with old posters the shop has produced.

They have two Vandercook presses, one about the size of SLC's and one a bit larger, as well as two gigantic presses, one of which is semi-automated and is used for large runs of over 1,000 posters. They're still actively making posters for bands that come through town, though they've branched out a bit from the "hillbilly" bands and coffee brands they used to promote.


Everyone was really warm and friendly, and it was awesome to see actual print-makers doing their thing in a working print shop. It seemed like they're people with a real affection for the work they're doing, which is really great. I'll leave you with one more beautiful picture . . . Don't you just want to curl up and live there?

Threadless

This may be more relevant to the screen printers of the world than the book-makers, but it seems like something you all might enjoy . . . In fact, I have the feeling it's probably something you already know about, switched-on, plugged-in hep cats that you are.

Threadless sells t-shirts designed by visitors to the website. You can submit your t-shirt design, and if it gets enough votes, they pay you and start printing it. There are also prints on paper. Some of them are pretty fantastic. My favorite might be Mister Mittens' Big Adventure, although it's hard to pick.

Anyway, just thought it might be incentive for those of you who were thinking about rigging up Amy's home silkscreen . . . or maybe just for those of you who want fun t-shirts. I wonder if there are others websites that are running this sort of operation . . .

A portable bouquet book

I put this book together the night of spring formal, just for something to do. It's not very fancy, but I thought I'd share it here since it's been a while since I posted anything.

The cover is pink construction paper, with flowers cut from a catalog. It's covered in clear packing tap to "laminate" it and bound with regular sewing thread in a single-signature of plain computer paper, cut to size. It's not quite 5" square (about 5 1/4" wide, 4 3/4" high), and 40 pages (10 sheets).

I had to use 3 strips of packing tape for the outside cover, folding them over the top and bottom and the side edges, and then two more pieces for the inside cover. It's a bit of a mess, since I did it on the floor, and it picked up all kinds of dust and grit on the tape. Obviously I didn't plan that one out very well. But I really like the shine it gives the cover. I'll have to look into other methods of laminating covers--short of buying a great, big laminating machine.

I'm not sure what I'll do with it. Maybe use it as an address book. I'm not sure. It's far from perfect, but it was fun to make. With the exception of my mat (a tiny little thing, only about 12"x12") and a knife, everything I used was just stuff I had lying around, and it was nice was to reassure myself that I can still make books without a proper studio.

On another note, my friend Kristin sent me a link to Rope-a-Dope Books, a small publishing co-op in Boston. There's not a whole lot to look at on the blog, but I thought it was worth passing on.

And speaking of links, I've been slowly compiling a list of book arts-related websites and blogs and things, so if you have any resources you like, let me know, either in the comments here or by email.

Brian Dettmer

The first artist featured on the list of unusual books I linked to the other day is Brian Dettmer.

As it turns out, he seems to have some work showing at a gallery in Manhattan, Kinz, Tillou, & Feigen, so those of you who'll be staying in the tri-state area could go check it out in person. For those of you departing New York, there's his Wikipedia page and a bunch of pictures of his modified books to console you.

109A!

Hey, all! Ali and I talked about starting a blog for our class, so here it is. It's called 109A, so it'll be like we never left the studio at all. Possibly that's a little perverse, but Kris says never apologize for yourself, so there.

For your perusing pleasure on this inaugural post, a collection of The Most Unusual Books in the World, courtesy of Kristin Maffei. I'm not quite sure why some of them are supposedly unusual, but my personal favorite is the teeny-tiny New Testament. And one book that isn't on this list but should be is Well Done, a book that must be baked before it can be read. Oh, yeah.

So I'm just getting started here. If anyone has any ideas about how to make the blog better, say so--Lauren, I know you know your way around Blogger better than I do, and Ali, you design minx, I'm sure you have something to say.

More links about books and book arts coming soon. If you come across any interesting book stories, send them along. And, of course, what this is really about is the books we've been making since the end of Kris' class, so send pictures or bookmaking anecdotes. Maybe I'll finally tell the story of my corn palace.

I'm gonna miss you guys, but not really because you're gonna send me pictures of all your new projects, right? Right?