Crandall Printing Museum

This was an awesome field trip. The only functioning Gutenberg printing press in the world is rather impressive, with sturdy olive-press style construction, boiled linseed oil with lead and copper oxides in the ink, and a replica type throwing tool. It's in the Crandall Printing Museum in Provo, UT.

The presentation was cool: the presenter walked us through a simplified engineer's narrative of the development of each part of the system. First we went through making punches and making type (an idea possibly obtained from the Orient), mass-producing type, setting it in a stable place, making useful ink, and finally developing a reliable way of printing pages. The printed and dried raw sheets were then sold to monasteries, where monks carefully and elaborately decorated each page of the Bible and then bound them into volumes. (I imagine that not quite so much care in decor was taken with other books of the era.) The next 50 years brought millions of books to light as printing became a well-established technology and the Renaissance came into full swing. Nice timing, eh?

The technology fascinated me. The typeface started as a filed piece of iron which was then punched into copper. The copper functioned as a mold for the letter-end of the type and had to be cast with a dimensionally heat-stable alloy (13% antimony, 80% lead, 7% zinc as I recall; a rather obscure mix that seems to work perfectly) so that it would conserve the shape of the cast with enough precision to be useful. Incidentally, a well-designed mold added perfectly straight sides so that the type could sit next to itself and remain properly aligned. The casting device (the name escapes me) was set up to be able to easily cast several of a letter in a minute or two, or several different letters almost as easily. The first printing was done with small tracts and publications in common languages, so when Gutenberg landed the job of printing Bibles for the Catholic Church, he had to file, punch, and throw enough of 256 uniquely Latin characters (counting accent marks, common abbreviations, &c.) to set six simultaneous sheets of the Vulgate version of the Bible. It was a massive project, and his financiers reposessed the shop before it was complete. (I suspect they continued its operation and fulfilled the contract. Our tour guides didn't mention it.)

What got me is that a top-of-the-line press from 1830 was nearly identical. The bed and press were larger and 16 pages could be printed instead of 2. The casting tool had had a trigger added to avoid opening the mold between letters. That was it. The principles were the same, the tool was almost identical, and not even the ink had changed.

The ink was boiled linseed oil with copper and zinc oxides mixed in. It was very black. Gutenberg had to develop this too; the quill pens of the period used a very thin water-based ink which wouldn't adhere to the type and transfer to the paper at all well.


I must say, I was extremely amused when I read a quote on the wall extolling the incredible impact of printing on humanity--arguably unparalleled as yet--and then saw that the reference was an "internet edition" of a text. The Internet is, I think, effecting a similar change in society in these days; however, it still has a few hundred years to try to match moveable-type printing.

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Organizational details

If a class assignment involves the minutes from a meeting, I expect a dry time. The minutes from the establishment of the highest governing councils in the LDS church were to their nature, but there are fascinating underlying details contained in them.

The assignment is the minutes from a meeting of 24 men who held the office of High Priest in the church in 1834. This is the same office and authority that Melchizedek held in Abraham's time. In this document (Joseph Smith Papers Revelations and Translations, pp. 639-648) we see that an interesting medley comes out. For example, page 640 ends with a historical tone explaining the meeting, page 642 starts with names, agreements, and a general record of what transpired in the meeting, and continues on to a soft revelatory tone. Here we are informed in a passive tone that this council is for this, extreme cases are to be judged so, governing body equivalencies, quorums, and balances, how to ensure fairness and avoid insult, and other details of operation.

I call this a 'soft' tone because the informational section says nowhere "Thus saith the Lord." It is firm and direct about how the council should work; the basics of receiving revelation had already been established in the minds of the people (sections 8 and 9 of the Doctrine and Covenants come to mind), so the Lord simply revealed the working structure and relied on the council to obey the instructions and seek His guidance for the details.

I'm also surprised by how carefully laid out the rules are. Political problems are countered (mind you, not 'entirely avoided') in one case by requiring that an equal number of members of the council be appointed to speak in favor as well as against an individual accused of breaking church law. (For example, this council would hear charges of adultery and would consider excommunication for it.) Also, those dissatisfied with the conclusions or those discovering new evidence are provided with venues to seek amends.

Also, the structure has a certain resiliency designed into it. If the president himself is absent, one of his two counselors (in this case, one of the two men appointed to help with his work) would be able to stand in. Also, a binding majority of the quorum is 7 of the 12, with worthy and reliable men being called to fill in the remaining seats as required.

Meh; I get distracted with intricacies. That's probably why I'm in computer science and electrical engineering...with some dabbling in social engineering, which the council of high priests is a fine example of.

BYU Museum of Art visit

I had a good time during the class' visit to the MOA this last Wednesday. I learned a bit about myself...and a bit about religious art.

See, I thought I loathed humanities. It gives me the heebie jeebies when a person starts asking about "what this picture means." This is particlarly true when they proceed to take a bronze relief and invoke the imagery of the cross to carefully come to the conclusion that one figure is representative of divinity while I intrinsically held approximately half of that notion. The figure's position and poise conveyed power and influence on deity scale, while the second figure's positioning conveyed a lesser degre of existence. Why would we reach out blindly, grab some symbol with merely geometric applicability, and proceed to rigorously build these impressions ex nihilo into discrete facts when I already had them well in hand?

(Please please please realize that the above passage makes some attempt to lampoon my former way of thought!)

Heh. So I didn't like that bit. As the conversation progressed, a comment was made: whatever the original artist did or did not intend (which I was handling internally as canonical), we can take what we see and feel in the art and use it as a way to examine ourselves. Self reflection and examination; this process of conversing was a somewhat crude instrument to promote them. I think.

Also, if one wants to absorb much of the available imagery, it helps to start from small quanta and slowly iterate through all of the possible combinations of small interpretations. This eventually turns into the part I really like: the pieces come together into a sort of story or explanation, and as pieces are noticed and interpreted variously the bigger story changes or illumines accordingly.

So, did that last paragraph confuse you? Heh. Me too. That last sentence was way too long. This is the other tidbit I learned about myself. I am too vague. I will stumble all over myself and try to describe the description. Once, during the tour, I volunteered a comment pointing out one specific aspect of a painting. Our guide then asked, "So...what does that mean?" I was caught completely flat-footed. Absolutely astonied. Instead of being the kid that is too good for this, I was suddenly the kid who knows less than half of the game and just tried a move that is 'dumb.'

I notice, now, that the idea of challenging one's self with questions developed from religious art is actual a neat idea. It is similar to reading scriptures: the questions I need to ask are not necessarily inherent in the art, but they are, I think, inherent in my thinking. Thus, analyzing it doesn't evoke what the artist wrought, but instead invokes the process of internalization.

Anyhow, I learned a) that I CAN benefit from introspection from the Dreaded Examination by Humanties Attitude (which isn't so bad after all) and b) that said Examination "Isn't So Bad." I'm glad I went.

Kurono Perdencia

So I was planning to get each of the last two weeks' blog posts done on time...but I failed to even look at the quizzes until after they closed.

That's annoying, but that's life.

Sorry, TA's, for leaving you two less blog responses to read. Assuming you read them. I'm not big on begging for mercy either, but I can try.

Woof.