The vanity of the late Philip Larkin has come to light in a previously unseen letter to a photographer. The witty correspondence with Fay Godwin from 1985 reveals how the womanising poet struggled to control his public image as he grew older.

Half joking, half in deadly earnest, Larkin tries to prevent photographs being used that expose his baldness or girth. 'I now have three conditions that photographers must promise to observe in what they print,' he writes to Godwin, who was a friend of the poet as well as a renowned portraitist and landscape photographer.

He goes on to list the conditions in parentheses: '(I am not bald, I have only one chin, my waist is concave) and this means that about the only picture of me now available is full-face head and shoulders, chin up, in dark shade. If you feel your genius could flourish under such restrictions, let me know.'

The letter is part of an archive that contains much of Godwin's work, negatives, camera equipment, transparencies and digital images as well as correspondence with several of the influential British writers she worked with, including John Fowles, Ted Hughes and Larkin.