On a Monday evening in March 1958, the poet Sylvia Plath wrote herself a note for the morning: “Must be up early, to laundry & steal more pink pads of paper tomorrow.”
At the time, she was working as a first-year English teacher at Smith College in Massachusetts, where she herself had studied, and where these “pink pads” were used for internal memos; she had been surreptitiously stockpiling them all month. “Have already robbed enough notebooks from the supply closet for one & ½ drafts of a 350 page novel,” she had written a week earlier, about the “pink, stiff, lovely-textured” pads that made the task of writing seem “finite, special, rose-cast”.
