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:

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.