Crandall Printing Museum

This week, I had the opportunity to tour the Crandall Printing Museum in Provo. It is the most complete museum of it’s kind in the country and houses multiple functioning printing presses, authentic décor, and very capable and experienced printers. First, we learned the effects of the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg- what previously took months of labor and lots of literate workers could now be copied multiple times in much less time. It still surprised me how long it would take to complete a page, however, and I was amazed at the intricacies involved. As I watched a page get set, inked, and printed I was amazed at the amount of thought and trial and error that must have gone into creating such a machine. I have a new respect for those who had to dig through letters not much larger than a bobby pin to find the right ones and then proceed to organize them into sentences upside-down and backwards. I can only imagine the headache that would give me after a matter of minutes. Despite it’s difficult nature, this hard work ushered in a whole new world of learning and sharing.

It was also interesting to get the church point of view on how the printing press assisted in its founding and growth. Our tour guide is certain, as am I, that the invention of the printing press was no coincidence. In it’s early years, it enabled hundreds of people to obtain their own bible to keep in their homes and study, and decades later it worked hard to create 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon to assist Joseph Smith in spreading the new word. I was fascinated to learn that in the printing of the Book of Mormon, the workers averaged two pages a minute for seven months! That pace is hard to maintain for 10 minutes let alone day in and day out for seven months! I have no doubt that God gave those boys extra strength to help them accomplish their task. This rapid pace allowed for a huge quantity of books to be printed and bound in a seemingly impossible amount of time- a feat not even considered by early monk scribes. I know that God had a hand in this work in order to get His church established when He wanted it to be. To this day, the church takes advantage of the evolved forms of publication to spread its message to all the corners of the earth.