We have to look at the messages themselves for the answer. What do they say? “Alone, alone, alone... lost now lost…Take a look at this one, now: that’s an H... an E... there’s an L... and there’s a P. Help. “Help” is the most common word in all these messages. It occurs in just over half of the ones I’ve found, although not in any version of your article that I’ve been able to check. Here: help, help, help, help... and here: help where is... this one says: help us help...

Cries for help, yes. I think this means that we are not alone; the conclusion is perhaps not inescapable but, really, I can’t think of a better one. There are beings among us whose presence is unknown to us, unsensed, and they are leaving messages hidden in our own books. I don’t know how they manage the printing, but perhaps they simply write in such a consistent way that it only looks like printing, or maybe they write using some kind of printing-pens – this is all speculation. Writing like this, you would have to have a strong imagination, so you could see the written phrase in your mind as it would appear translated into this streak-writing. Then you might write each letter a little dot or strand at a time, distributed over several square inches of paper, knowing that, when you streak your eyes over what you’ve written, the letter will resolve out. It’s a bit like writing the letter A, starting with the first few bits of the left leg, then the upper, then the cross piece, and so on. Each letter would have to be an exploded diagram of itself.

We can postulate some sort of intelligent beings that leave each other messages, extended messages, using books. But see how strange their idiom is: “help where is” for example. It could be an incomplete sentence, like “help, where is the exit,” but I get the impression that it was intended to run: “where is help?” An interrogative, albeit a childish one. Or “lost now lost”—is this part of a longer series of repeated words, alternating “lost” and “now,” or is it a complete thought in abbreviated form: “I am lost, now I am really lost”—? Well, maybe not.