As I was thinking about the Printing Press, I had a memory of visiting some museum in Provo with my mom (multiple times, even) where there was a model of the printing press and some moveable type. I looked it up—the Crandall Printing Museum. But it was gone, closed in the last few years sometime! I was sad.
But then my mom did some asking around and found that the Crandall had resurfaced in Alpine! Someone bought the stuff and was resurrecting the museum. They have a ton of cool historical items in their collection, like a Gutenberg Bible and the only working model of the Gutenberg Press! They also have a bunch of things related to the original printing of the Book of Mormon back in Joseph Smith's time, including a model of the Grandin Press.
It turned out that the museum wasn't yet officially open in Alpine (the grand opening was coming up in a few weeks), but I got in touch with someone who worked there and she agreed to give us a tour! My mom came with us since she had so many fond memories of the original Crandall. :)
I was excited about the kids seeing the printing press model, but honestly, the tour was way better than I was even expecting. The lady who led it was interesting and fun, and I hadn't anticipated that we'd get to see every step of the process—including the way they poured lead into mold to make the moveable type! She actually showed us how that worked—heated the lead, poured it, and made some pieces of type for us to look at! It was fascinating!
See the little trail of liquid lead that hardened instantly into a wobbly line on the stone?
I was happy that Malachi ended up coming with us on this field trip, because he was fascinated and asked a million questions, and even ended up talking for a long time with the lady after the tour was over. They became great friends, apparently. She even let him take home one of the pieces of type as a souvenir!
There was definitely an art to the way they pushed the ink onto the type forms with a leather inkball. If you don't coat the whole form (it has a more precise name, but I've forgotten it…a case, maybe? a galley?) evenly with ink, you get empty spots on the finished page, as you can see we did above! Daisy and Junie got to help put the ink onto the type.
You also had to be very precise in the way you lined up the type over the page. Often they would do two printings for a page (if they wanted some of the text in red, for instance) and there was no room for error in pressing the second group down into exactly the right spot among the earlier group of words.
Malachi helped screw down the press mechanism to push the inked plates firmly down onto the blank page!
And then he hung up our finished pages to dry on a drying line!
And here is the Gutenberg Bible we got to see. I've only ever seen another in the British Library. They are so beautiful! I wish I had my own copy (in English, of course) :)
It was a wonderful field trip; one of the best. Just the sort of thing we love doing. I would totally go back and pay for another tour, now that the museum is up and running and they charge a fee for tours. We'd like to do the tour where you learn about the Book of Mormon printing too!
Here's the information about museum tours if you, too, would like to go there!
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