Person-to-person Promotional Pieces: Business Cards And More Small Ephemera Printed At Hatch Show Print
The work that this great old print shop has produced over the century and a half (almost!) it has been in business has been a reflection of—or a response to—the needs of its customers.
These days, HSP is known for its colorful show and event posters. In the mid-twentieth century, the shop was certainly producing a lot (A LOT) of show advertising using eye-catching color, large hand-carved wood blocks and wood type, but customers also needed smaller printed pieces, including business cards, school lunch tickets, raffle tickets, labels, and identification and membership cards like those featured here.
Looking at these pieces of the shop’s past and Nashville’s history, a few things stand out:
Much of the metal type used to set the words and numbers for this ephemera still exists in the shop—the Old English or blackletter typefaces used on the Naturopathy Registration Card in particular (or what may be recognized as “Gothic” today in layman’s terms) are annoyingly easy to come across when looking for something else among the type cabinets in the shop!
The Rainbow Dinner Club in Printers Alley is now called Skulls Rainbow Room and the address is slightly different.
Mrs. Hart set her business apart with blue ink printed on pink labels for her consulting firm. The location of the business is now part of Vanderbilt University’s campus.
Only a couple of years younger than the print shop, McEwen Laundry Co. must have been a bustling business if it required five salesmen! The last year the company was in business hasn’t been determined, but it celebrated fifty years in 1931, a milestone covered in The Tennessean in October of that year.
Some of the metal type on these cards measures three or four points tall or 1/24th of an inch. It is a relief to not have to read, much less typeset, proof, and print letters that small these days.
And, of course, the shop created other self-promotional pieces smaller than a poster! The flier below was likely printed in 1885 (and probably used as an ink blotter), way back when the shop was owned and operated by its founding brothers, Charles and Herbert Hatch.
