“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

“The table beside Ruburt senses him even as Ruburt senses the table … The abilities of the tree are latent in man as, dear Joseph, are the abilities of man latent in the tree.”

Now you think of dogs as friends of man, and you personify gods in human terms. [...]