Crandall Printing Museum

Last week I got to go to the Crandall Printing Museum here in Provo. The Museum is run by a handful of old, retired printers, who learned their trade as boys early in this century. They have developed this museum to give modern web-surfers a feel for the heritage of the technology we now enjoy.
They had a working replica of a Gutenberg press that was pretty cool. They had a set of type that was an identical replica of Gutenberg’s type. They had set the press with the first two pages of the Latin bible, exactly as Gutenberg had it. The hand type caster was particularly cool to me. It was a small device that Gutenberg used to mass produce type. I have always known basically what a printing press was and how it worked, but I never thought about the fact that you would need so many of each letter. In order to set each page, a printer would need dozens of each letter and symbol. And at that time, there was no foundry that could cast the type. The hand type caster allowed them to make their own type, the first ever set of which was in Latin.
Another thing that amazed me was how long it must have taken to set the type. All we ever hear about the printing press is how fast and efficient it was, and how it opened the flood-gate of information to Europe. Well, it must have been a very arduous job bending over the type case in a dim printer’s shop looking for p’s and q’s. Of course all of the type had to be set upside down and backward so that it would print properly. I used to think that the type setters must just be good at reading the imprints on the type upside down, and had got used to how to position them. Fortunately for them, they were a lot more resourceful than that. They had all the type sorted into cases. One box for every letter. The capital letters were held in the upper case and the small letters were in a lower case. The case was labeled so that all a type setter had to do was reach into the ‘p’ cubby and grab a letter. The type were cleverly cast with a notch on one side, so that the type setter simply had to line up the notches, and voila, the type was set upside down and backwards.
Also in the print museum they had a replica of one of the presses that Benjamin Franklin had (the one on which he printed Poor Richard’s almanac). Franklin was surely a brilliant man. He was knowledgeable in every field known to man at the time. And he was proactive in spreading his knowledge and ideas to others. They also had a replica of the press that was used to print the first edition of the Book of Mormon. The circumstances that surround that printing were truly miraculous. The Erie canal had been finished just in time to bring this state-of-the-art ‘acorn’ press to the small town of Palmyra New York. Joseph smith asked EB Grandin to print 5,000 copies, large book printings at the time were usually around 500. The whole project (type setting, printing, and binding) completed in seven months. (See this article for more information) They printed one booklet of the first 16 pages of the original setting of the Book of Mormon. I recommend the museum to everyone.