Rule29 Be Pimpin' (Hatch Show Print)

Justin Ahrens · 2005 · Letterpress from wood and metal type, blue and silver inks

A promotional poster for Rule29 pulled at Hatch Show Print in Nashville, the letterpress shop that has been printing show posters since 1879 and is now part of the Country Music Hall of Fame. Art directed by Rule29 with designer Terry Marks helping bring the piece to life, and set from the shop's own wood and metal type, the sheet stacks a towering outlined R over a doubled letterform, with 'ULE' across the top right and a ghosted silver 29 below the rule. Turned on its side down the right edge, in a battered slab wood face, sits the studio's running joke of a headline: 'Be Pimpin'.' The silver blocks and visible register shift are pure Hatch, a design made by what happened to be in the drawers that day. The bottom imprint reads C 2005, HATCH SHOW PRINT, JORDAN, crediting the shop's designer-printer who produced the run. The accompanying photographs were taken during the press run with Jim Sherraden, the master printer and archivist who led Hatch for more than three decades.

The archive is not a museum. It is a working shop.Jim Sherraden

View this poster in The 29 Collection