Nashville’s legendary letterpress print shop was founded by the brothers Hatch in 1879 and remains the living heartbeat of classic American poster design. Since the early days of the Field Notes Quarterly Editions, they knew that to explore the history of American printing, publishing and design, they were going to have to collaborate with Hatch Show Print.

Hatch is known for letterpress-printed posters. For many years, they’ve found ways to recombine their enormous archive of historic images and type in ways that always seem fresh and vibrant, but also timeless. Hatch makes large posters. But Field Notes makes small notebooks. Here’s how they worked together:

Field Notes imagined a three-poster public service campaign about effective poster design, named "Pressing Issues: A Series on Ink, Paper, and Muscle". Then the crew at Hatch set off to design and print. And. They. Killed. It.

Next, the three finished posters were cut up into covers for the Fall Memo Books. Each poster yielded six covers, and these 3-packs include one book from each poster.  As a result of that, and the natural variations in letterpress printing, there’s a ton of variety in the run.

• The covers are on Domtar Cougar 100-lb white cover stock with a brute-force application of a variety of hand-mixed Kennedy oil-based inks, including “Just About Pantone 637.”
• The body pages are ruled in light blue on a smooth 60-lb text stock from Finch.
• Ruled lines: 1/4" (6.4mm)
• Memo book dimensions are 3-1/2" × 5-1/2" (89mm × 140mm)