“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Once said, the explanation will certainly seem obvious. (Pause.) Prentice-Hall, in capsule form, so to speak, is a representative of the most diverse kinds of thought currently held in your country — that is, under it’s overall auspices you have the most conventional establishment-oriented textbooks, devoted to continuing traditional ideas. You have, there, a concentration upon education as it is understood at that level.

Our books do not appear under the Parker heading. (Long pause.) They are in their way bridges between the two opposing ways of thought. They are too anti-establishment to be college textbooks, but in their way far too reasonable to be considered eccentricities — in the same fashion, now, that the Parker books are.

Our books are in the regular trade department. This poses some problems for the legal department, which is given to the most literal translation of reality as interpreted through law. You have almost what you could call a schizophrenic relationship, existing, say, between Parker Books and Prentice’s trade-book division. The textbook division represents the workings of the intellect in the usual terms of rational thought, and in those books the qualities of the imagination, of the psyche, of poetry, of creativity, are quite lacking. Such qualities are indeed considered threats, for they do not accept easy answers, and are not content with the status quo.

(9:23.) Give us a moment … Prentice does more than it knows it does. As a corporate entity, it also has a conscious and unconscious intent, as do all organizations, because they must mirror the people who belong to them. In its way Prentice is an educational institution. It tries to fly ahead with avant garde ideas, while at the same time protecting its flank of college textbooks. (With amusement:) It does not know if our work is fact or fiction, in the deepest of terms. It knows the work is not forged. It knows that I appear in sessions, for example, but it does not know whether or not my ideas correspond with a greater reality, or whether they are the result of an extraordinary psychological creativity.

The legal department knows how to deal with the Parker books. (Tam told Jane it’s putting disclaimers in all Parker books.) It knows how to deal with fiction. It knows how to deal with conventional textbooks — but in a fashion our books combine all of those elements, and transcend them. If Prentice were as conventional at heart as its legal department, it would not publish books at all, except perhaps for the textbooks.