PROVO — If Louis Crandall gets his way, a replica of the Palmyra, N.Y., print shop that produced the first copies of the Book of Mormon will soon be re-created in Provo as part of a "museum for the printing of the scriptures."
The Provo businessman has begun a $370,000 fund-raising effort to expand his privately owned Crandall Historic Printing Museum at 275 E. Center St. The planned expansion will include a re-creation of the E.B. Grandin print shop, which churned out 5,000 first-edition copies of the Book of Mormon in 1829-1830.
Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said an angel led him to gold plates, buried in a hillside south of rural Palmyra, containing a spiritual record of the inhabitants of the ancient Americas, and that he was able to translate the record — now known as the Book of Mormon — under God's direction.
Members of the church revere the book as holy writ and consider it a companion scripture to the Bible.
A devout member of the church and a printer by trade, Crandall has for years been telling visitors to his museum about his belief that God inspired Johanne Gutenberg to invent the first moveable type printing press back in the 15th century, which made the Bible available to the common man for the first time ever. He uses a replica of the Gutenberg press to explain how moveable type was developed and used to print the Gutenberg Bible.
Boy Scout troops, Brigham Young University students and civic groups already flock to his museum, which Crandall says is fast becoming too small to handle the crowds. He plans to purchase an adjoining building which now houses the George E. Freestone Boy Scout Museum. He'll leave that exhibit intact but will use the extra space behind the small displays to expand his own exhibits, which presently include a re-creation of Benjamin Franklin's print shop and a replica of the press on which the Book of Mormon was printed.
The extra space will also house a re-creation of the original Deseret News print shop, a gallery for historic religious documents, including first-edition copies of rare scriptures, a gift shop, a bookstore, printing guild bookbinding and paper-making exhibits and an auditorium for guest lectures.
"I've spent half my lifetime collecting the materials and information to tell the story of the printing of the scriptures," says Crandall, who begins each tour of the current museum in the "Gutenberg room." He explains how 13th century monks laboriously copied the Bible with quill and ink until Gutenberg invented his printing press and began printing indulgences for the Catholic Church.
When he used it to print the Bible, "that brought the world out of the Dark Ages" by giving the common man access to the scriptures. Historians have long hailed that development as the beginning of the Reformation.
Crandall's expansion plans will allow him to take visitors through 400 years of printing history, explaining how he believes each historical event built on the others to culminate in the printing of the Book of Mormon.
"Even with all that history, printing really hadn't changed much in 1830 from what it was like in Gutenberg's day," he tells visitors, adding that it took 2 minutes and 18 seconds to set each line of type in the 520-page Book of Mormon. To produce 5,000 copies, printer John Gilbert printed a total of 2,857,000 pages in a period of seven months, from Aug. 26, 1829, to March 26, 1830, he said.
The museum, now incorporated as a non-profit charitable foundation, has just begun fund-raising for the expansion.
Crandall said the setting for his re-creating of various print shops was realistic enough that the LDS Church used his museum recently to film a television commercial depicting Gutenberg's first printing of the Bible.
While architectural drawings of the museum's expansion plans have been completed, Crandall said the timetable on the project will depend on how fund-raising efforts progress. But with his faith and his life's work tied up in the project, he has no doubts that everything will fall into place.
"It's been a labor of love, and I believe God's hand is in it."
Note: For information on lectures and demonstrations, call 801-377-7777. E-MAIL: carrie@desnews.com