I've recently found myself with a lot of TV viewing time; my wife and I have a newborn daughter, which means we spend a lot of the day quietly convincing her to sleep, or staying very still so that she might stay that way. Skipping around the channels over the last week, I've noticed that CNN has been using a clever, if cliched design device to brand their coverage of the presidential debates: a faux "show print" look.  They've adopted a quick and dirty block-letter look to frame the various debates and their participants, which lends an air of Americana and down-home folksiness to a public proceeding that has been bled dry of any real content or substance. Strangely, I can find only the barest hint of this branding carried over on their "Election Center" website as evidenced but the stars in the header bar and the odd advertisement. Still, despite the lack of continuity—and an honest-to-goodness connection between design style and subject—I couln't help but be reminded of two famous poster shops specializing in this unique style, and I did a little digging into their history to satisfy my curiosity.

Hatch Show Print was founded in Nashville in 1879, specializing in handbills and posters for events like carnivals, circuses, and vaudeville acts. In the 1920's, the beginning of country music's golden age, the shop flourished, and the unique carving and design style of Will Hatch elevated their product from workaday advertising to something above and beyond folk art.  The company has changed hands several times over the last few decades, but is now safely part of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and it continues to produce high quality posters for a wide variety of show business clients. For more information on Hatch, I recommend Hatch Show Print: The History of a Great American Poster Shop by Kingsbury, Sherrarden, and Horvath. It chronicles the history of the shop from its earliest days and is full of pictures and examples of their work.

Here in Baltimore, we have the Globe Poster Company, founded fifty years after Hatch, but catering to an identical clientele. Globe also used woodblock letterpress on its earliest runs, and later became known for its multi-inked designs featuring neon colors and handcut lettering. I talked to a friend who worked at Globe in the mid 1980's, and she told me their process at that time had not been changed for decades: Artists in the screen shop cut sheets of rubylith and they used this to silkscreen blocks of color onto blank paper. These blanks were then moved to the letterpress area, where a mixture of wooden and metal type was composed in forms and run in black ink over the color to produce the final product. Looking at their catalog of current offerings, it's clear a computer has since been installed as a typesetter, ending the unique authenticity of the hand-cut and composited designs, but they have continued to produce posters and other advertising materials to the present day.

Eight years ago, I bought four reproduction Globe posters from a hastily built Geocities storefront. Each print is on heavyweight 24 pound cardstock, and because the examples span several decades, the evolution of their production methods are clearly evident. Earlier prints are more refined, have a cohesive design, and use the medium to its fullest potential. Type is knocked out of the colored areas, the black plates are custom-built, and design elements are more common: stars, flames, halftoned portraits, an publicity shots. In later prints, the design is modular, colored blocks are simpler and solid, while the type is restrained and geometric, lacking the dynamism of the earlier years. On all of the prints, the black letterforms are rounded with age, uneven, and smudged. Halftones are blown out. Registration is off, sometimes by inches. In short, they are perfect. They are a unique mixture of practical advertising and decorative design, stripped of all unnecessary ornamentation, balancing the message with simple shapes and color for maximum visual impact.

If you're a fan of historical advertising, or of blues, country, or soul music (I am both), there should be something to interest you in the catalog of either shop.