Hatch Show Print in Nashville

Here's the great old neon sign for Hatch Show Print, the legendary letterpress plant:

It's on Broadway in Nashville TN and is famous for having made posters for country music shows, all kinds of stage productions from vaudeville to opera, all with a remarkable flair for snappy design that's always professional but never slick. Here's the showroom:

  Click to enlarge! You'll be glad you did. These small posters are all for sale at quite reasonable prices, and they sell t-shirts too. The people who work there are very friendly (at least the ones who were there the day I went), just make sure you don't let the store cats out when you walk in. Look online at
www.hatchshowprint.org

More Pepsi--for the Road!

 I'm still traveling, so here are a few more scans from the fantastic Pepsi brochure to tide you over until my triumphant return:

First, the Crown Lithographing Department!

The Label Printing Department! 

One Million  Case Storage Capacity! That's a lot of sugar water!

 Here's a spectacular view of the Bottle Fillers and Labelers!

 More giant tanks!

 And finally, the Great Battery of Pepsi-Cola Carbonic Gas Tubes!

See you soon!

Another Film Noir Poster from Belgium

This one's for another "White Slavery" picture. Both titles translate as "Slaves for Rio."
The English title is "They Were So Young," and the story centers on a Rio modeling agency that's a front for a call-girl ring. And it's got Raymond Burr! He plays "Jaime Coltos."

Pepsi Beats the Others Cold

 Here's a beautifully painted and reproduced Pepsi-Cola 39th Anniversary brochure from 1939. Click to enlarge! This is some nice four-color printing, here.

 The Romance of Pepsi-Cola!

 The labs and the cola-nut department!

 These storage tanks look like something by Bruce McCall.

 Raw sugar!

 

How many men drowned in those giant syrup vats?

MORE TO COME!

Two Mexican Film Posters from the 50s

 The first one, "el Ciclòn del Caribe," seems to be a musical. Click on it and savor its full-size garish glory.

(I don't know why the lady is green!)

 The second, "Trotacalles," seems to be about streetwalkers (Spanish speakers, am I translating "Trotacalles" correctly?) Unfortunately it's in pretty bad shape and  it may be past salvaging. The artist's name is Vargas and I'm told he was a very prominent figure among the Mexican artists painting movie posters back in the day.

Another French Book Poster

CLICK TO ENLARGE!

















I picked this up already framed in Paris a few years back for about fifty Euros. It's a lithographed advertisement for "La Porteuse de Pain," a popular novel of the 1880s by Xavier Montépin. A huge bestseller in its day, it's still in print, and as Montépin's French Wikipedia entry points out, it's been adapted for stage, screen and television. The ad is for the first installment of the book's serialization.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_de_Montépin
(If you don't read French, one interesting fact in the article is that one secret of his phenomenally prolific output was the extensive use of ghostwriters.)

I don't know how many copies of this there are floating around, but here's one from the Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, and I know that the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris has one also:
http://www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CPicZ.aspx?E=2C6NU07A8UCT
This one is unique (as far as I know), though, in that it has had addenda pasted onto it stating that the first installment is free. (Shades of modern viral marketing campaigns.)

Get a load of this beautiful litho:

(Sorry about the glare. That's some cheap glass on there and I'm too thrifty to get it reframed.)