Love, Letterpress, and an Elevator Rescue

Look how happy everyone is to be at Hatch Show Print on spring break.

There are some things I have always loved more than a normal person probably should. Letterpress is one of them.

When letterpress started making its way back into contemporary design, I looked for almost any excuse to get near a press. There is something magical about the process. Wood type, carved blocks, ink, paper, pressure, and all the small imperfections that remind you a real person made the thing. You can see the craft, but you can also feel it. It is design with fingerprints on it.

That love is one of the reasons meeting Jim Sherraden meant so much to me. Jim helped bring Hatch Show Print back into the spotlight and introduced its history, process, and incredible archive to an entirely new generation of designers, artists, musicians, and curious people like me.

If you have never been to Hatch Show Print in Nashville, it is worth a visit. The shop has been printing since 1879 and is still producing work with vintage wood type, hand-carved imagery, ink, and working letterpresses. It is part museum, part working print shop, part American design history, and part playground for anyone who enjoys making things with their hands.

You can learn more about Hatch here: https://www.hatchshowprint.com/

Over the years, we have collected quite a few Hatch prints, and I have been lucky enough to create a few pieces inspired by its history as well. One of my favorites is our Triple Alice poster, which was inspired by Hatch's famous Triple Johnny Cash print.

The story behind Triple Johnny is one of my favorite examples of creativity showing up when nobody is trying too hard to be creative. In the mid-1990s, Jim was giving a group of Cub Scouts a printing demonstration. He was showing them how printers reposition an image on the press, so he intentionally printed the Johnny Cash plate in the wrong spot, moved it, and printed it again on the same sheet. Suddenly there were two Johnny Cashes. Eventually there were three, a gold background was added, and a teaching demonstration became one of Hatch's most recognizable prints.

You can see the original Triple Johnny Cash poster here:
https://shop.hatchshowprint.com/products/triple-johnny-cash

I loved that story so much that years later we created our own tribute with our client rock legend Alice Cooper repeated three times in the same spirit.

That print is now part of the poster archive I have been building, and one of the unexpected joys of going through all this old work is realizing the posters are never just posters. They are little doors into moments I had almost forgotten.

You can explore the poster archive here: https://posters.ahrens.design/ And Triple Alice brought back one of our family's greatest stories.

Full Clark Griswold

Years ago, we were driving to Orange Beach for spring break when I realized Nashville was on the way. Nashville had Hatch Show Print, and therefore, using flawless dad logic, our children clearly needed an educational letterpress experience.

In my mind, this was going to be one of those defining family moments.

The kids would walk into Hatch, smell the ink, hear the presses, see all the wood type, and immediately understand why this strange old printing process mattered so much. They would learn something with their hands. They would discover design history. They would make something themselves. Maybe one of them would even turn to me and say, "Dad, thank you. Until today, I never understood the cultural importance of movable type."

I had gone full Clark Griswold.

Except instead of Wally World, I was dragging everyone to a historic print shop. To their credit, the kids were good sports. They watched the presses. They made prints. They listened. They walked through the shop. And if you look at the photographs from that day, you can clearly see that one member of the Ahrens family was experiencing significantly more joy than everyone else.

That person was me.

I loved it. I loved sharing Hatch with them. I loved showing them why it mattered to me. And even though their level of design transcendence was somewhat lower than I had hoped, I remember thinking that this would be one of those family experiences they would always remember.

I was correct. Just not for the reason I thought.

Where Are the Kids?

About half a day later, we arrived at our spring break apartment in Orange Beach. We started unpacking, getting settled, carrying bags back and forth, and doing all the things you do when you finally arrive after a long family road trip.

At the time, I was also completely addicted to the Harry Potter books. So while unpacking, I would occasionally stop and read a few pages.

This detail becomes important. At some point Sarah asked a very simple question.

"Where are the kids?"

That is not a sentence you want to hear when you have several young children. I looked around. No kids. Then I looked out the window of our beach high-rise and noticed several fire trucks parked outside. That also did not seem ideal. I headed into the hallway and discovered firefighters working to force open the doors of an elevator.

Inside were our children.

They had been trapped for roughly 20 minutes.

During that time, they cried, tried to comfort each other, and eventually moved into what can only be described as emergency survival planning. At some point they apparently began discussing which sibling they would eat first if nobody rescued them.

Twenty minutes.

That is all it took for our children to move from, "Mom and Dad will find us," to, "We should probably begin assessing available food sources." Basically, they had created a Donner Party succession plan before Sarah and I even realized they were missing.

Thankfully, the Orange Beach firefighters got them out safely. Nobody was hurt. Nobody was eaten. And we walked away with a family story that has now been told approximately 5,000 percent more often than Dad's Incredible Letterpress Adventure.

For years, whenever I thought back on that trip, I naturally remembered Hatch first.

The kids did not. They remembered the elevator. Of course they did.

The Memory You Plan Is Not Always the Memory They Keep

I think there is a parenting lesson buried somewhere in all of this.

As parents, we work pretty hard trying to create memories for our kids. We plan the vacations, the museums, the dinners, the sporting events, the Christmas mornings, the road trips, and apparently the educational stops at historic print shops that Dad is absolutely certain everyone is going to love.

And I still think all of that matters. Showing up matters. Taking them places matters. Sharing what you love matters. Giving your kids experiences that might stretch them, teach them, or simply show them another part of the world matters.

But after raising four kids, I am increasingly convinced that we do not get to decide which memories become the important ones.

They do.

Sometimes it is the trip you saved for all year. Sometimes it is a conversation in the car. Sometimes it is something stupid everyone laughed about around the dinner table. Sometimes it is a tradition you barely thought about at the time.

And sometimes it is Dad reading Harry Potter while the fire department extracts everyone from an elevator.

You just never know.

That is one reason I have enjoyed building the poster archive so much. I originally thought I was simply preserving work. I wanted a record of the things we had designed, the posters I had collected, the people I had collaborated with, and the pieces that influenced me along the way.

But the archive has become something much more personal. A poster does not only preserve what was printed on the paper. It preserves what was happening around the paper.

Where we were living. Who was working with me. How old the kids were. What we were worried about. What we were celebrating. Who was with us. What mattered to me then. What I had completely forgotten.

One image can suddenly unlock an entire room of memories. And sometimes those memories have very little to do with the poster itself.

What We Leave Behind

There is something else I love about the Hatch story. Triple Johnny Cash exists because Jim was teaching a group of Cub Scouts how printing worked.

He was not trying to create an iconic piece of American graphic design. He was showing some kids how to move an image around on a press. One experiment became something people still hang on their walls decades later.

I thought I was taking our kids to Hatch that day to teach them something. Instead, the whole experience keeps teaching me something.

About creativity. About parenting. About expectations. About family. About how little control we really have over what becomes important. And maybe most of all, about being present enough to notice the stories while we are still living them.

I have spent much of my adult life making things. Businesses. Brands. Posters. Books. Podcasts. Trips. Family traditions. The older I get, the more I realize the thing itself is rarely the whole story.

The story is what happened while we were making it. It is who was standing beside us. Who laughed. Who rolled their eyes. Who remembers the day completely differently than we do. Who thought the letterpress demonstration was amazing.

And who the kids collectively decided would be eaten first. So thank you, Jim. Thank you, Hatch Show Print.

And thank you to the Orange Beach firefighters who rescued our children before the family had to test the accuracy of their emergency meal plan.

The poster is still pretty great. But the story around it is even better.

#RunningAhrens #HatchShowPrint #Letterpress #PosterStories #Parenting #FamilyMemories #Design #Creativity #The29Collection #LookingBackMovingForward