The Crandall Printing Museum

This past week I had the opportunity to attend the Crandall Printing Museum located on Center Street in Provo. This was the second opportunity I had to attend the museum and I enjoyed it even more than I did on my first visit. I would highly recommend taking a tour of this museum to any one who is interested in the founding of our nation or church history.

The Museum is divided into four sections. The first section is dedicated to the invention of the Gutenberg press by Johannes Gutenberg in mid 15th century. The tour guides explain the process by which Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press. The process was absolutely painstaking and involved hours of work and tinkering. In order to make one single letter took Gutenberg hours of work and experimentation. The patience and genius of Gutenberg are evidenced by the demonstration of the printing process by the tour guides. The best part of the printing museum is the hands-on demonstrations that occur throughout the tour. Not only do the guides tell you about printing they actually show you how it was done. They show every detail from the casting of letters down to the actual printing. This tour helped me appreciate the art and science of printing much more. The museum has also accumulated many artifacts over the years including old bible pages and printing presses themselves. I was fascinated by the old bible page that they passed around the group. The intricacy of the writing and decorations evidence the years of copying that it took monks to complete just one bible. This definitely gave me a greater appreciation for Gutenberg’s invention. He truly was an inspired man. Without his inventions we could very well be stuck in the dark ages.

The next room was the colonial room. Here we were greeted by Benjamin Franklin. In this room we learned about the Benjamin Franklin and involvement with printing, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. It was interesting to see the differences between the printing presses. The press in the Franklin room was smaller and more streamlined. In this room we were also told about Thomas Paine and his book Common Sense. The literature that was produced during this time was just as important as the war itself. Without printing and documents like the Declaration of Independence and Common Sense there would be no America today.

The third room that we entered was a replica of the shop in which the Book of Mormon was printed; in fact the room is almost exactly the same size, down to the inch. The press in this room was produced at the same time as the actual press used in New York to print the Book of Mormon. Here we learned of the great difficulties of printing the Book of Mormon, including the punctuating of the book while setting the type. The most fascinating story told to us was by Brother Crandall, one of his guests of the museum was the binder at Colonial Williamsburg. When Brother Crandall asked how long it would take to bind 5,000 books, the guest politely asked, “Do you mean 500?” The guest was amazed that the book binders were able to bind over 5,000 books in such a short amount of time. There are many other stories that, to me, evidence the hand of God in the production of the Book of Mormon. It is Brother Crandall’s testimony and I would add mine to it, that the hand of God was involved in the printing of the book. The final room was the Deseret News room, we ran out of time and were not able to hear the full presentation but this press was much smaller and more streamlined than all of the other presses. It was amazing to see the evolution of the printing press and the way that printing has helped shape our history. I enjoyed my visit to the Crandall Printing Museum very much and plan on returning again soon.