So last week our class went on a “field trip” to the Crandall Printing Museum. In the museum they had replicas of the original Gutenberg printing press, the printing press that Benjamin Franklin used, and the press that the Book of Mormon was printed on in 1830. The rooms in the museum were also built to resemble the original rooms where Gutenberg and E. B. Grandin worked. I’m just going to list a couple of the cool insights I learned on my visit.

1. How much Gutenberg actually had to invent to invent the printing press. He didn’t just make the press. He had to develop a new kind of paper, a new kind of ink, a way to mold and cast the type, a new alloy to make the type so it would mold properly, and a way to set the type. 2. How Gutenberg’s bad business practices drove him into bankruptcy but jump-started the printing industry. When Gutenberg was printing the Bible, he didn’t just do it all on one press. He built six separate presses, and trained six different teams on how to use them. This got the job done quicker, but drove him into bankruptcy. Though his personal business was ruined, there were now six separate teams out there who knew how to run a printing business. They branched off and started their own businesses, which gave the printing industry a big head start.

3. I learned a whole bunch of cool stuff about Benjamin Franklin’s life. He started off as a printer, but branched into science, and politics, and everything. We saw the Declaration of Independence typeset into his press, and got to touch the type.

4. The printers manuscript for the Book of Mormon was a copy of the original manuscript that Joseph dictated to Oliver Cowdry. They had basically written just the words with no sentences or punctuation. There was no editing process. Well, actually, the editing was done by the printer, but he was typesetting backwards.

Basically, the thing that struck me the most was what a miracle both the printing of the Bible and the Book of Mormon were. Both turned out astoundingly well, based on what the printers had to work with.