Palmyra - Grandin Building

This entry is mostly for our family journaling purposes and for future reference...but if you're interested in how a book was published in the 1830's then you might find this interesting also.

Below is the scene as we drove into the town of Palmyra, New York.  It's hard to see  (and a photo does not do it justice) but this is the intersection in town where there are 4 churches on the corner.  If you look closely, you can see all 4 spires.   Not that all those buildings were standing at the time of the restoration, but the idea is that Joseph Smith was torn between the different churches at the time because they all preached different things, using the same Bible

Right on the main street in town is the E.B. Grandin Building, which is where the first 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon were printed.  At the time, that was a ridiculous amount of copies to be made, even by today's standard, that's a lot of prints for a first printing.  Who knew that in 2011, the copy count would exceed 150 million printed in over 82 languages.

The inside of the bookstore looks as it did in the 1830's.  We thought it was interesting that books were just covered in plain paper until someone requested that the copy be bound in leather - kind of like made-to-order hardback books.

One of the coolest things about the Grandin Building is that the floors are original to the building and the time period of Joseph Smith.  The kids walked on the same floor as the Prophet; that was cool.

We got to look at the process of how books were printed in the 1800's.  These small bins contain thousands of tiny letters.

Below, Julia is holding a handful of these tiny letters.  Each letter of print had to be chosen, placed, and "locked" into place.

Julia is holding a block set of letters that make up a verse of scripture.  It would be time consuming, to say the least, to set up these pages to type.

In this picture, one complete page has been set (on the left) and the frame for an entire sheet of print is on the left.  So, 16 pages of text would be printed at a time on one sheet.

Below are the inking tools.  These "stamps" would be used to spread the ink onto each set of letters, so that they could be printed.  What was interesting is the amount of ink still on the floors and walls of the building from the printing and cleaning process.

This is the Smith Press which was the first of it's kind.  It was only able to be delivered to Grandin's business in the 1830's because of the completion of the Erie Canal, which ran directly behind this printing store.  It wasn't used much shortly after that time.  This press was made out of metal, which made each page printed on this press more clear and even. 

After the sheets were printed, they were hung on racks to dry. 

Then, a stack of sheets were stacked on a pallet, and lowered out the window to the floor below where the sheets would be folded and bound into a book.

Here is Julia folding her own sheet.

And, just to make sure the sheets were folded well enough, they were run through a press like this one:

Then the folded sheets were lined up along the spine, and notches were cut using saws to create a place for binding.

This tool (below) was then used along with a needle and thread to bind the book together.  This was a lot of work that had to be repeated 5,000 times.

As was mentioned earlier, many books were sold with a simple paper cover, like today's paperbacks.  Joseph wanted the Book of Mormon to be special, so he had leather covers made for the books.  These presses were used to create those covers.

Julia was particularly interested in the giant "pizza cutters" on the wall that were used to created the sets of stripes that are on the spine of the original covers of the Book of Mormon.