Visiting the Crandall Historical Printing Museum

A few weeks ago, I rode my bike down to the Crandall Historical Printing Museum. It wasn’t my first visit to the museum, but in fulfilling the “field trip” requirement for our class unit on printing, I decided to go back. I thought it would be interesting to see what my impressions of the museum were this time around. Here are a few of the thoughts I left with:

- The fact that the Gutenberg-style press at the Crandall Museum is the only one of its kind in the world that is still operational = very cool.

Cool.

- Even cooler, though, I think, is being able to place that technology within a timeline of technological development. Keeping old stuff around that is now obsolete is okay sometimes, but it’s so much more interesting and useful to me when I can see where that technology came from and what it led to and how it is related to the technologies we still use today.

- The museum overall helped to remind me that technological development is a process, not a series of individual events. Individual developments in printing interacted in many different directions with the culture, art, literature, government, science, etc. of the time, and looking at all of those other elements helps in making sense of individual events.

- I’m sure glad that places like this exist. It’s a little cheesy with the whole go-back-in-time thing, and it’s by no means the greatest museum I’ve ever visited, but I am really grateful that it exists and that there are people who care enough about it to keep it going.