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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