Corrected and Improved by the Author

 Today I took a visit to the Crandall Historical Printing Museum.  I wasn't really sure what I would find there so I just drove over and walked inside.  No one was at the desk so I wandered inside and I found a group of elementary school or middle school students inside on a field trip.  They must have been an LDS charter school or something and were listening to a presentation of how the first copies of the Book of Mormon were printed using the old printing presses and process.  I slipped into the back of the group and listened a bit.  The presentation was obviously more of an overview than technically historical so I wandered around a bit as I listened, examining the old presses and prints that the museum workers have made on them.  The tour guide said something that really caught my attention though.  He said that With the 37 signatures and setting the type and hand sewing the books together, the 5000 original copies of the Book of Mormon should have taken 2 years to produce working at full speed full time.  A miracle occurred and the books were printed in only 7 months by (if I heard him correctly) fairly inexperienced printers.



At first I thought it was interesting that this printing museum was obviously a religious museum too, specifically designed to tell the story of print and its evolution from wooden Chinese movable type up until the Declaration of Independence, the Book of Mormon, and other early printed church documents.  But on second thought I realized that the history of the Bible and the history of print are pretty much one and the same.  For more than a thousand years, basically the only book really thought worth copying down or printing was the Bible.

The museum has THE only working replica of a Gutenberg press the most complete print shop along with it.  I was surprised to see that even Gutenberg's press was basically the same as the presses used hundreds of years later by the early makers of the Book of Mormon.  Obviously there were many improvements in the way that it worked and inks and type etc., but the basic idea of printing really didn't change until this past century.  

I imagine many of you will also have the chance to see the museum so I won't talk a lot more, but I saw something that I really liked in the Declaration of Independence exhibit that I really liked and I thought summed up my post pretty well.  Even though we think of him as a founding father, the guy who invented bifocals, and the man who basically discovered electricity, Benjamin Franklin always thought of himself as a printer.  An epitaph he wrote in his youth was on the wall that shows together his love for print and a faith in living once again with God.