Crandall Printing Museum

This week, I found a gem in Utah Valley, where I have lived my whole life but, apparently, did not know enough about. I visited the Crandall Printing Museum. When I entered, the host told me that it was the most advanced Gutenberg museum in the world. I acted amazed, but thought, "This guy needs to get out more." Over the next two hours, I was impressed over and over again, and learned a great deal about the miracle the printing press was.

Gutenberg developed his printing press in a very unspectacular way. He duplicated a wine press and added a bed in which to place the paper and set type. He invented a new metal alloy, now called "printer's metal," which expanded in the mold so that the type would be uniform. He even invented a new ink that was sticky enough to stay on the type, as opposed to the runny ink used by the monks. After all of this development and invention, he used it to do small printing jobs for merchants and officials in the area. His break came when he was asked by the Catholic Church to print the Bible in Latin, and developed type in Latin for that specific purpose. It was probably because of this job that his press prospered for some time.

He did make a financial miscalculation, however, when he trained six different teams of men to make type and print the Bible. These teams caused Gutenberg's bankruptcy, since it was too much expansion too fast. but these six teams then took the printing technology to neighboring villages, and it quickly expanded throughout Europe.

At this point in the tour, we jumped forward to Benjamin Franklin, and the press during the American Revolution. I never knew that Franklin was a printer, let alone one of the most powerful in the colonies. The press was essentially still Gutenberg's press, with almost no innovation. Franklin did a lot of things for the colonies and for the Union, but one of the best--he helped to get Thomas Paine's Common Sense published when negotiations with Great Britain failed. He was also essential in the writing of the Constitution and promoting it in the presses. In reality, the presses throughout the colonies made the Revolution possible, and without Franklin's influence, the Revolution very well could have failed.

We then jumped forward to the E. B. Grandin Print Shop, located in Palmyra, New York. Joseph Smith had translated the Book of Mormon, and was in need of a shop to print it. He and Oliver Cowdery approached E. B. Grandin, and wanted to print five thousand copies, a number unheard of at this time. Most books were printed in five hundred book runs, so that the printer could be assured of getting his money back, but the Martin Harris farm was mortgaged to provide collateral. Though it was a huge risk for Grandin, he printed the Book of Mormon in just a couple of months. The true miracle is that all the books were bound very quickly. Binding five thousand books should have taken several months, but it was completed quickly and the Church was able to start selling the books and spreading them throughout the country.

These three events combined show to me that the printing press and its spread throughout Europe and later to America was truly a miracle, and allowed the Revolution to be unified and the Book of Mormon to be published.