Crandall Printing Museum

This past week I visited the Crandall Printing Museum on Center Street in Provo, Utah as part of my Honors Doctrine and Covenants class.  I visited the museum once about four years ago (my freshman year in my Honors Book of Mormon class).  It hasn’t changed a whole lot since then, but it was definitely a worthwhile experience.  Once again, the type-writing letter-casting machine thing was broken.  What are the chances of that happening both times I go?  He made a reference to his favorite show, The Three Amigos again, but this time he didn’t have the Chinese wooden block prints of the character 林 which he was holding upside down…

This time visiting, I have a much deeper impression about how amazing Gutenberg was, and how many things he had to do to create the printing press.  It also amazes me that they were using almost the exact same technology in Joseph Smith’s day for printing as Gutenberg used several hundred years before.  That truly amazes me.  Gutenberg was a true renaissance man.  It was an interesting point that the first printed Bible and the first Book of Mormon were printed in almost an identical manner.

We spent a lot of time talking about Benjamin Franklin this time.  I definitely learned some interesting facts about the history of printing in America.  I really enjoyed Benjamin Franklin’s epitaph: “The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer (like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding), lies here, food for worms; but the work shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author.”

One thing that was definitely not there last time I visited (but that we curiously didn’t even talk about) was the replica Gold Plates.  They are made of a gold-silver alloy called electrum, and it was created based off Joseph Smiths and Oliver Cowdery’s accounts of the plates.  The top plate even had etching of the Reformed Egyptian characters based off the rubbing that Joseph made of the plates.  In most artists renditions of the plates, the sealed portion has a metal band of some sort around it.  Oliver Cowdery described it as looking like wood or something, so the replica plates actually use tree sap and beeswax as the seal, if I remember correctly.  That was pretty neat!

One thing that was really neat, and pertinent to our class, was when he talked about the printing of the Book of Mormon.  He had a famous binder come through several years back, and he asked him about how long it would take to bind 5000 copies of the Book of Mormon.  The man said, “You mean 500, right?”  He said no one printed 5000 of anything back in those days.  But, that’s why Martin Harris had to mortgage his farm to have them printed!  It’s also a miracle that the Smith family had moved right up to New York near the Eerie Canal, and that a printer had come right to their small township allowing the Book of Mormon to be printed there.

Overall, it was a very worthwhile experience.  They are trying to raise funds to expand their museum right now, so if you have lots of money, you should donate some to them!