“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“When I first mentioned the family name, Grunaargh (as Seth spelled it out for us in that session over three years ago), I knew that its members had something to do with printing, or the promulgation of printed material. Since at the time I was working as a typesetter,² I figured my impression had derived from that. However, after that session my impression ‘grew’ in such a way that I knew this family had something to do in a more direct way with the printing process — with the fascination of putting ideas down on paper through the use of typefaces that would, as much as the language involved, express the ideas behind the words themselves. In the plant where I worked at the time, I ‘recognized’ several people in the Grunaargh family — all were printers — and with a feeling quite as strong as the recognition I had for Sumari.

“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

5. “My friend wanted nothing but plain, simple letters — nothing fancy,” Sue told Jane and me as we discussed her material. She drew some of the typefaces either designed or approved by that large, male, “earlier” creation of her whole self. In all cases the letters were of the cleanest simplicity, both for esthetic reasons and ease in carving and casting.