Off, Off, Eely Tentacle!

It's interesting to see, in the archives, what Aurelia chose to omit from Letters Home. (What Ted Hughes wanted cut from it is another story.)  Cut from Sylvia's letter of October 2, 1956 is a particularly long list of requests to her mother for material goods and time-consuming favors, one of many such lists omitted. Written from Cambridge, this letter says Ted will be easy to buy Christmas gifts for because he needs everything, and Sylvia plans to

• buy him a briefcase (and Sylvia herself needs one, too; it's the most important piece of writers' luggage) and 
• a bathrobe. Or maybe Aurelia can send the bathrobe? Sylvia asks that it be "warm but not bulky" and specifies the brand name, Viyella. 
• And will Aurelia "please, please" shop for, buy, wrap and send two separate, highly specific wedding gifts to two of Sylvia's American school friends? Sylvia wants to set a precedent so that when she and Ted have their wedding reception in Wellesley, her friends will send gifts. 
• Sylvia adds, "Now, sometime at your convenience, could you send me my two German grammars," and 
• "could we have a few packets, at least three, of corrasable bond" (because that kind of typing paper is hard to find in England). 
• Sylvia finishes the list with "Could you investigate about addresses of children's book publishers--I have no addresses here; you could just look in the bookstores, perhaps. . ."

Aurelia noted in the letter's margins that she could send them her own briefcase; wrote "No" about the bathrobe because Viyella was an English brand; wrote "where?" next to the request for the German grammar books, and sent four packets of corrasable bond. In Gregg shorthand, she penciled the word "omit" twice in the letter's right margin, a word she wrote on dozens of letters while editing Letters Home.