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In 12ac the definition is 'tea'. In 9dn you're looking for an 'ancient knew' which could be modified to give another word, though that's not the answer.

I think the answer 'given only in etymologies' is 6dn. Has anyone got far enough to say what's going on with the 'letter pairs'?

Ah, right, I hadn't 6dn as I know Latin and had assumed it was in Chambers by itself. Mea maxima culpa!

Jut spotted something v promising in the letter pairs for the down clues. They don't read in sequence so it's not as simple as I'd assumed.

However, despite knowing the theme I can't get anything from the across pairs at all.

simonsays, 20A is a disused word for a plant "term for spinach = H. The answer is longer than the entry.
36A = Proper name of a US naval officer, that means extremely and jolly as in 'it's jolly good'.

I can't help with 25d and 29d as I'm stuck on those too.

I'm now finding this very tedious. There are so many variables as it's difficult to determine which the replaced letter is in some cases, plus letters that replace themselves, resulting in greater ambiguity.19d appears to be one such, so the letter could be any one of six. A second could be 30A or 31D, but which?

On top of that, the pairs of letters taken in clue order don't seem to yield anything sensible.

Finally the light has dawned and I now have only to match up the substitutions. Approximate coincidences aren't good enough, which is why the letter pairs took me so long to sort out. With a bit of Googling, for which the word 'exact' might be, let's say, handy, I hope others will be able to complete the puzzle without leaving it until the eleventh hour.

For 25ac you need to think very laterally: 'Hope ...' is at the start for the clue for a reason, and paper knives have nothing to do with the solution. For 29dn, the last one I solved, look up 'log' in Chambers.

If it doesn't give too much away, am I right in guessing that 27 down has a connection with the theme?

ionacarr's hint for 25 across is a very finely judged hint to a most creative (but fair) clue: thanks.

I can't see a connection with the theme in 27dn, carpox1, but it's about 40 years since I read the book, so there may be something thematic that I've forgotten.

Whether fair or not, it breaches a standard Ximenean and Listener convention, but I've often observed in the past that Sabre is given more latitude by editors than is given to others.

Since 20A and 26A do not clash with any clued downs I assume the letter replacement must coincide with the unclued entry, which seems rather unfair, or perhaps it's in one of the unchecked cells.

I have in mind one possible entry for the unclued (8,4), which might be connected with something in ionacarr's last comment. Am I on the right track?

I don't think it breaches conventions. "Hope letter-opener" should be thought of as "How a letter to Hope would begin" i.e "D---- ---. So it parses in the conventional manner.