Left to right: Nick Curto, Hal Rainbow, Bruce Manheim, Charles Lehner.

Expo Visitors Drawn to Urantia Book Audio

By Nick Curto & Charles Lehner

We came across an interesting phenomenon as we were manning the booth set up by the Urantia Society of Greater New York (USGNY) at the NewLife Expo in Manhattan on October 19 and 20, 2024.

When we told people, especially younger people, that The Urantia Book was available in audio and may be accessed online to hear or read for free, their interest immediately grew. They then spent more time with us at the booth. We handed them a brief description of what information and subject matter the book contains and how to easily locate it, via three Urantia Book websites.

Their reaction is something to be considered when marketing The Urantia Book to current and future generations. What we would now like to do in future outreach exhibitions is to play the recorded Urantia Book so that people would hear passages as they approach the booth. We think this would be a great additional way to reach people and let them know that the recording is available and that they can enjoy it for free.

At the time The Urantia Book was published in 1955, reading a printed book was the only means of accessing its information. Today, of course, people are finding out what the book contains not only by purchasing it but also by accessing it and listening to it on the internet, thanks to The Urantia Book Fellowship’s website (www.urantiabook.org), Urantia Foundation’s website (www.urantia.org), as well as through websites such as USGNY’s www.urantia.nyc. Younger people are no longer carrying large books around with them but are instead reading and listening on their cell phones, and that trend is here to stay.

The 2096-page Urantia Book is too big and heavy to carry around for most people. Thousands are choosing to listen to it or read it online, where it’s easy to find. This means it has become much harder to find out how many people per year are accessing the revelation—book sales are no longer the only indicator of the numbers obtaining its cutting edge information.

The bottom line is that to effectively market The Urantia Book to current and future generations we must more aggressively advertise that listening or reading the UB electronically is totally free and convenient on the internet.

Nick Curto with Francisco Martinez

Urantia Book Table

The Manhattan Expo was about mind-body-spirit and conscious living. About 60 exhibitors set up booths at the venue, the House of the New York City Bar Association, near Grand Central. There was a schedule of lectures, panels, and workshops during the weekend. Several other vendors offered books about spiritual-philosophical topics.

The Urantia Book Fellowship co-sponsored the Society’s presence, along with an anonymous donor. USGNY has been at NewLife in past years and one attendee recalled seeing a Urantia booth at the expo in the 1980s. However, this year was the first we’d exhibited in some time.

We sold about 25 copies of The Urantia Book at a discount, and gave away or bartered some more. We also distributed a few copies of The Story of Everything from Square Circles, a paper-by-paper summary of the book, as well as a few secondary works from the Jesusonian Foundation and Origin Press / Urantia Book Academy. We circulated flyers and pamphlets about the book and USGNY, and made available a few translations. We sold one copy of El Libro de Urantia.

The “Ureadthru” daily reading project (https://ureadthru.com) was presented at our table, with hard copies of the spiral calendar distributed along with the books for those who wanted them.

Many people who stopped by were new to The Urantia Book but several were already familiar with it. Some said they believe it to be true. Others said they owned a copy but had not gotten around to reading it. Neighboring vendors were interested too. One person showed us a copy of their Book of Knowledge.

Spiritual practitioners and wellness coaches taking an interest in the material should give people a reference to the philosophical framework given by the revelators. We could have done more to connect with the more body-focused or science-oriented clientele, and we will do just that in the future.

While we had an abundance of outreach materials at the table, regrettably some were distributed with outdated contact information, but the contents will stand and it is not hard to find the organizations online. We actually had some difficulty fitting all the Urantia Book-related materials that we had on our table, so we used an additional small folding table that we’d brought along. A neighboring book vendor used shelves, a technique we will be adopting in the future. We placed fliers at the additional tables that the Expo placed on two stories, and most of them were gone by the end of two days.

We all thought that the Urantia Book booth at the NewLife Expo in NYC was a very good idea indeed! We are now planning to exhibit the book at the Levittown, NY, “The Eyes of Learning” Annual Fall Festival on December 14, 2024.

This article was originally published in the Mini Messenger, edited by Mark Wood, November 7^th, 2024.