Hidden Treasures- Crandall Print Museum

I can already tell that this will probably be one the harder posts for me to write but that's not because I have a lack on things to say or that I'm stumped or anything like that. It's actually more of the opposite, there are so many things that i'd like to be able to effectively portray and express through my post but I feel as though I won't be able to accomplish this quite like i'd prefer.
So yet again, I had the opportunity to do something that was completely out of the ordinary this semester but it followed suit along with the other things I have done and it was a great experience.
I was taken back to the my elementary years as I joined an AP History class from Spanish Fork at the Crandall Print Museum right here in our very own backyard.


The Crandall Print Museum is located right off of Center Street here in Provo and has been up and running since 1996. Louis Crandall is the owner of the museum and it was really neat to see him there and participate in the tour, they have quite the skit they do as you go through out the tour as well.

Maybe you can tell, but this is a page of the Book Of Mormon ready to be inked and pressed

The tour started off with them explaining that past of written text which included everything from manuscripts to vellum to cuneiform to scripts that were quite similar to the ones we saw in the library where the pages had borders around them that looked as though they were embossed with gold and looked really fancy. They also passed around a 800 year old page of the bible that was written on the hide of a baby calf. For me it was a neat thing to be sitting in there and actually already know about the things they were explaining and also knowing a lot of the background and detail stuff about things like cuneiform as they were explaining it.

Before walking into this museum I was pretty ignorant to the knowledge of how the printing press came to be and what it was that Gutenberg actually did. It wasn't ever talked about in any of my classes growing up and so all that i've heard about it has been spoken by others that assumed that I already had an basic idea....but i didn't...at least till now. So i'll do my best to explain the things that I learned and I also have some videos that will hopefully give a better idea of what it was that I did and learned and that should be easier than me trying to explain everything with words.

Gutenbergs father was a Goldsmith and it was probably expected that he would follow in his footsteps but that wasn't exactly the case. Gutenberg didn't have the same passion for that type of work as his father but he was still learned in it's trade because it was common for fathers to work with sons in whatever work the father did. I can relate to Gutenberg in this aspect as I did a lot of farming growing up because that's what my Dad did for a living. However, I don't share the same love for it as him and I won't be taking over the family farm whenever that time is does come. I still gained a knowledge of what it takes to be a farmer though. Gutenberg's ability as a goldsmith played a huge part of him being able to invent the press that he did.

This is an authentic furnace where metal is melted and then used to make a mold or punch.

Gutenberg had spent most of his time working with metal making rings and jewellery of sorts. It was at this time that he figured he probably could make letters. That wasn't the tricky part of the whole process though. The way he made his first punch is really amazing! What was really cool is that at the museum is that they did just that. They showed us exactly how it was done and I was able to see it first hand.
So Gutenberg took a rectangular size that was fairly small and held it over a candle. He wanted the soot and carbon from the candle to make the end of the metal black and dark and then he would take a sharp object and write a letter into the soot. So we'll say it was a B and this was traced into the black end of the metal. Next Gutenberg would put this piece of metal into a press of sorts and start carving away and wearing down all the sides around his letter traced in the soot so that eventually he had a metal punch with the letter B carved out and raised out of the end.

He took this harder punch and beat it into copper. This would result in the letter B impressed into the  copper and that was his mold. At this point of the presentation I was somewhat confused as to why he needed to impression his punch into copper but that was made extremely clear to me in the next while. The copper piece that had the letter B pressed into it was then put into a type of clamp that unfortunately I don't have a picture and it's really hard to explain what it does. I do however have a video that i'll post and hopefully you can understand what happens. Metal was poured into this clamp and it fills the letter B but also makes it into a punch. The reason why Gutenberg needed to invent this clamp that you'll see in the video is because it 's a lot easier to melt metal and pour it into this mold to make a letter B punch than to carve out a 50 letter B's that would be needed to print. Hopefully this makes sense? It's so hard to explain! It's really interesting though and  you really ought to go to the mueseum and sit through a tour, in all honestly, I know you'll enjoy it!

 The making of a punch! Done within seconds and extremely neat. Definitely a lot faster than carving out punches every time you need a letter.

This is  a vide of the inking part. The ink was not your typical ink. Gutenberg had to come up with a thicker ink that which was being used by scribes because that was too runny and was impossible to use on a printing press. In his days it was Lead added to copper oxide but that's not available today for a variety of reasons. The ink used here though was very thick, almost a paste of sorts.

Gutenberg luckily didn't have to invent paper so he did catch a break there. However he couldn't use the same paper that everyone else was using to write handwritten books or anything like that. Paper used in his printing press actually had to be a bit damp in order to successfully print.

I dont think I mentioned this, but this Museum is the most advanced printing museum in the world! It's also the only museum that has the Gutenberg press that also has real type with it. This is a one of kind gem that we have extremely close to us and many don't know a thing about it. Louis Crandall actually made a comment about this and it went something along the lines that the museum is known by the world and people from all over come to visit it, except for the people that live in utah. 

My trip to the museum was extremely enlightening and well worth the time and the few couple of bucks that it cost. I hope that it was understandable and can tell that it was a great learning opportunity for me and really opened my eyes to the world of Print. I can't think of a better way to grasp the concepts of printed text than visiting this museum. I highly recommend it to anyone that hasn't visited the HBLL King James exhibit yet or even if you have you could still go visit, or if you're simply in need of an idea for a date!