Celene Aubry is the first woman to serve as associate director and manager of Hatch Show Print, Nashville’s iconic letterpress print shop, in its 147-year history.Photo courtesy of Hatch Show Print A self-confessed maker and DIY-er, Celene Aubry fell in love with the process of letterpress printin g and took classes at Columbia College Chicago, a private art school. The beginning of her tenure coincided with Hatch Show Print’s move from Lower Broadway to its current, expanded location at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 2013. Today, visitors can watch her, along with a staff of eight full-time designers, create up to 900 posters a year for concerts, conferences, exhibitions, and special events. “I love the idea that an antiquated process still has relevance and can be a viable business in the 21st century,” she says. The Art of Letterpress “At Hatch, the designer is the printer, and the printer is the designer. Everything we do is designed in the shop. We’re working with printing plates (mainly handset by us in the shop), hand-mixing all the ink, printing every poster by hand, then loading that type into the press. Most of the printing blocks have been hand-carved in the shop, mainly in wood or linoleum. Some of them are as old as the shop itself.” Showtime “We create show posters for most of the artists that appear on stage at the Ryman Auditorium, which is a very old, iconic Nashville institution. ZZ Top closes almost all their tours there, and we always make a poster. Bands playing the Ryman for the first time are so excited—they get to have a poster just like ZZ Top, Elvis Costello, or Jon Batiste.” Keeping History Alive “One of the joys of being part of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is that we archive and digitize all the posters we make. And through those, you can see the consistency of the typography and the use of color, imagery, and graphic elements over the course of the shop’s history. It’s not comprehensive, but we have a collection of posters made in the shop from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s.” Knock on Wood “We probably have more than 1 million pieces of wood type. I’ve never counted! We have tens of thousands of hand-carved blocks, if not over 100,000. It seems like every week we’re making more. We have 10 or 11 printing presses that we work with, all within the footprint of the print shop.” Music Notes “There is live music everywhere in Nashville, but my favorite venues are the Ryman Auditorium, which is made entirely of wood, so everyone sounds fantastic, and the CMA Theater, which has the best acoustics of any venue I’ve ever been in. There’s a level of intimacy that makes you feel like you’re in the front row no matter where your seat is.” This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of Southbound. The post Behind the curtain of Nashville’s iconic Hatch Show Print appeared first on Atlanta Magazine. ...read more read less