Meet Celene Aubry of Hatch Show Print

Today we’d like to introduce you to Celene Aubry.

Hi Celene, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
After spending a couple of years carving images to make my own rubber stamps for greeting cards and mail art, a colleague told me about this antique process called letterpress printing. I was excited that it was somewhat faster than printing everything by hand and that I could still control the process from start to finish myself.

So, I started learning to letterpress print in 2007 at Columbia College in Chicago and fell in love with the textures and look of combining wood type with hand-carved imagery, and hand mixing the ink to achieve the colors I wanted to work with.

I spent any hour I could in the studio at Columbia College, outside of my job as the marketing director for a small, family-owned boutique resort in the British Virgin Islands, even earning studio time by doing odd jobs at the Center for Book and Paper Arts such as cleaning the beater room (where the pulp was prepared for papermaking) or putting type away from workshops in the letterpress studio, and such.

While printing as often as I could, I was getting to know the letterpress print community at large, by volunteering at a couple of museums, attending conferences and gatherings, and taking workshops with as many different teachers as I could.

In 2008, I took a workshop with some folks from a letterpress print shop in Nashville, called Hatch Show Print, and as soon as I understood that they were able to make a living making posters using the things I most liked to work with, wood type and hand-carved printing blocks, I realized that it wasn’t such a crazy notion to want to do the same thing myself.

I stayed engaged in the community, continued learning, and eventually, an opportunity presented itself to join the creative and industrious group of people at Hatch Show Print, learn the ins and outs of the business from manager Jim Sherraden, make a lot of posters, help the shop move into a set of beautiful new spaces in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 2013, and assume responsibility for managing the shop.

A dream come true, to be sure!

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I think if anything is too easy, you’re not pushing the limits enough or testing yourself enough. My previous job prepared me so that I came into the shop understanding the values of storytelling and having the ability to constantly evaluate the way things get done and being open to trying a different approach. And that it’s okay to be wrong and have to try doing something in a new way.

At Hatch Show Print, we design and produce customized products for hundreds of different clients every year, and each one can present a challenge or multiple challenges. At the end of the day, what we’re doing seems to be the same thing over and over-design a poster, printing a poster. But like a restaurant, where every dish is made to order and can depend on conditions beyond the kitchen’s control, every day can be a bit of an adventure in the shop.

We are working in a living museum, so the very type and presses we use are considered artifacts. As stewards of this shop, we need to take care of them so that they can continue to work for decades to come and we are the ones to repair them when something breaks, whether it is a piece of type or a press.

I like to say we’re on the cutting edge of nineteenth-century technology because we’re always pushing ourselves to find fresh ways to combine all the parts to make great posters that tell both our clients’ stories as well as a bit of this old shop’s story, in each one. As we make the work, we are compelled to educate our new customers and carry on long-running conversations with our repeat customers that don’t get old.

In some ways, each day can present something unexpected to tackle. As long as we are designing and printing posters, though, we’ll continue to flourish. Doing the work begets more work, or at least that’s what I’ve found to be the case so far, even in the last few years.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Hatch Show Print is a letterpress design and print shop, where we design and produce show posters, prints, and other work. Hatch Show Print has been in business since 1879 and has always been in Nashville. Founded by two brothers, Charles and Herbert Hatch, the shop really made a name for itself by creating and printing large format advertising – billboards and show posters – for live entertainment that toured the south and beyond.

Originally that was fairs and circuses, traveling variety, and minstrel shows, and then a few decades in, along came jazz, country music, rhythm and blues, and a little bit later, rock n roll, and soul, and nowadays, pretty much every genre of music finds its way onto the posters we make.

The shop has also always designed and printed advertising work for local businesses, and companies or organizations that host trade shows and conferences. Up until relatively recently (the early 1990s), the shop also printed other custom-designed work, such as business cards, letterheads for businesses, and show tickets, and we still do a little bit of this these days, specifically wedding invitations or posters or save the date cards.

Our specialty, and what we’re most known for, are the show posters that can often be purchased on the merchandise table at the venue, and the posters we do for businesses or organizations who are hosting meetings or conferences or wish to mark a milestone. We don’t decide what we’re going to make (except for what we sell in our gift shop!), the clients come to us to order the custom-designed posters. This keeps the work we do varied and interesting!

The process we use, letterpress printing, most simply put is letters pressed into paper with ink in between. It is an old and finicky process that produces wonderful results.

We design everything we print at Hatch Show Print and only print what we design. The purpose of that is to maintain our mission of preservation through production. We are using the gorgeous antique wood and metal type the shop has always had (some of it is over 140 years old!) alongside hand-carved printing blocks of images or graphic elements – to create the poster designs, and then we’re actually using those physical elements (the actual blocks) to print the posters by hand.

Using the type and blocks actually preserves them, and the knowledge of how to use them and the printing presses. Getting our work out into the world to be seen by as many people as possible is the best way for the shop to attract new customers. And, since we work with these tools every day, we know best how to use them to make great posters.

While the designers at Hatch Show Print have gone through the same graphic design programs as designers who choose to go into other fields of design, we use the same training and apply it to poster making and letterpress printing.

Can you share something surprising about yourself?
Hmm. One of the wonderful attributes of Hatch Show Print is the various impressions it makes on our clients and poster fans. It’s always interesting to find out what folks really zero in on as their favorite aspect of the shop and/or the work we’ve put out over the last 142 years.

I think it surprises people that we design everything we print and that as much as we say that everything is made by hand, from the poster design to mixing the ink, to actually printing the posters, folks who haven’t seen us doing it just get bowled over when they visit us in person and see the prints coming off the presses.

Some of our clients have been truly moved by how much effort we put into making a run of custom posters just for them that represents the story they want to tell. Usually, our posters are made to commemorate or celebrate a milestone or an event, and to have this goal that they’ve been working toward made tangible with something they can hold (and sometimes smell!) that is so vibrant and unique is just that – a physical representation of all the work that’s gone into them being right here, right now, whether that’s appearing on the stage at Ryman Auditorium for the first time, or hosting the largest tradeshow in their industry.

For us, the icing on the cake is when the posters get into the hands of the people they were intended for when they are buying them at the merch table at a show or receiving them for participating in a company event, and they really enjoy them as much or more!-than the client does. Posters need walls and vice versa!

Pricing:

• Tickets for the Hatch Show Print tour are $20 per adult ($15 youth ages 6-12); $47.95 for adults ($32.95 for youth ages 6-12) includes admission to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://hatchshowprint.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hatchshowprint/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hatchshowprint
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/hatchshowprint
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/countrymusichof