“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“I see myself, then, as one of the people involved in the thinking up and making of the typefaces. I see a large, sort of beefy man with a red face, sitting at a piece of furniture like a drafting table, carefully cutting out these characters. He had fingers like sausages; people in town were always amused that he was so big and worked with such small pieces. He made them out of wood, I think, and they served as molds or models that ended up cast in metal. He rubbed a substance on the wood grain to protect it. But using these models gave the alphabets some kind of standardization.⁵

“My heavyset friend was filled with the thrill of knowing that now words would spread faster. This is hard to specify, but he had the same feeling I have now about newspapers — the daily spreading out of ideas, and the kind of tremendous power behind that ability … I can see that corner of his shop/work area clearly in a half-light, illuminated by a candle in an enclosed mesh lantern sitting on a tabletop. This man had several apprentices, and he was a real artisan, putting ideas across in the form of movable type. I know that Gutenberg is credited with this invention, and probably rightly so; but I also feel this as one of those discoveries that appeared in several places at once, and that my beefy fellow’s shop was in the general vicinity of Gutenberg’s — in Germany? I can’t recall. This idea was ‘shared’ in many places at once, then.⁶

“I think my beefy gentleman, by the way, also wrote editorials….”