“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This noon Jane and I signed our wills, with, naturally, Bill Danaher and his wife as witnesses. While they were here, we received a call from Tam’s secretary, Nancy, who told us that she’d just mailed special delivery Tam’s corrected version of the letter to Ariston that I’d sent him on Monday. It’s Thursday night as I type these notes, and the letter hasn’t arrived yet. I hope to be through with the Ariston affair over the coming weekend, then.

(Yesterday we learned that P. Grenquist and others from Prentice-Hall met representatives, including the owners, of Ariston at the book fair in Frankfurt—another bit of information Jane and I wouldn’t have been told without asking; my present suspicion is that eventually Jane and I will learn that those in charge at Prentice-Hall knew all along that both Ariston and Ankh-Hermes had made changes in Seth Speaks, with their casual okay. [...]

(All during this time, October–November, we’ve also been involved in a series of hassles with the foreign publishers Ankh-Hermes and Ariston. [...]

[...] I’ve already written Ariston that we will sell them no more work after their dishonesty with Seth Speaks, and plan to do the same thing soon with Ankh-Hermes. [...]

[...] The publisher, Ariston Verlag, is actually located in Geneva, Switzerland; German is one of the four national languages of that country.

(I spent part of the afternoon and evening writing to Tam, asking him to defend us from the well-meaning but evidently inept efforts of various people in Canada and Switzerland to arrange for translations of Jane’s work in French, Italian, and Spanish—and I’d sworn off writing such letters following the fiasco with Ariston.... [...]

[...] All the details about the foreign rights fiasco are on file, so there’s no need to recount them here, except to say that Tam, serving as liaison for us with Ariston and Ankh-Hermes, has failed, as far as we know at this writing, to elicit any response from anyone at either place. [...]