I love Hatch Show Print in Nashville. I love letterpress in general. I once confessed this love to my friend and erstwhile Zine partner Kevin, and he held his ears shut. “Never say ‘Letterpress’! It’s a huge suck of time and money.” That’s a paraphrase. He said something like that. Then, several months later, he bought a small old press and some type. Go figure! Anyway, Hatch Show Print was one shop of probably hundreds or more that made letterpress posters for musical gigs around the country. Elvis, Benny Goodman, Johnny Cash, and countless county fairs all had show prints announcing their appearances. In this day and age of computer-layouts and digital printing, letterpress prints look quaint and analog, and perfect to announce the arrival of Bicycle Astronomy, with recombining of two very old analog technologies (bike and telescope). I hope to get this poster actually printed on a letterpress, so it has that great ink smell and you can actually see the indentations the moveable type made, but until then here is my digital interpretation of a show print. It’s going to be offered as one of the rewards on my kickstarter project.

The logo has been up on the header for a while, but I’ve mostly been mum about Bicycle Astronomy. But, it’s almost ready to be revealed. Bicycle Astronomy is a project that asks the question: what do you get when you combine the transformative power of both the bicycle and the telescope? Can astronomy inspire people to think about sustainability? Bicycle Astronomy is a unique public astronomy outreach (ie ‘sidewalk astronomy’) project that I’ll be posting on kickstarter soon. More to come, but for now I’ll let you see a prototype design of the Bicycle Astronomy mission patch, NASA style. Name that double star!