letters between literary lovers

84, Charing Cross Road is a non-fiction book of a series of letters written by a New Yorker Helene Hanff and a famous book sellers in London on Charing Cross Road (a street infamous for its many bookstores) called Marks & Company. Letters between the shop and Helene span for 20 years. Frank Doel, one of the clerks of the London store, quickly became her sole correspondent, and although they never met, their relationship through letters developed into very much a tender, perhaps even romantic nature. Reading these letters written before the time of text messages, e-mail, even Internet, is truly refreshing; when letters took days, even weeks to arrive, and the anticipatory touch of the envelope of a letter brought a sensation more wonderful than even the words within. Let the following letters -- originally written on typewriter -- speak for themselves. Here are my favourites, beginning with Helene's first letter to the now famous (although now extinct) bookstore:

[All double spaces in the letters written below are, in the book, only one space and a tab over]

14 East 95th St.
New York City
October 5, 1949

Marks & Co.
84, Charing Cross Road
London, W.C. 2
England

Gentlemen:
Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase "Antiquarian booksellers" scares me somewhat, as I equate "antique" with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare edition, or in Barnes & Nobles grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.

I enclose a list of my most pressing problems. If you have clean second hand copies of any of the books on the list, for no more than $5.00 each, will you consider this a purchase order and send them to me?

Very truly yours,

Helene Hanff
(Miss) Helene Hanff
---

Two months later, after a series of correspondence between Helene and the shop, including a transaction of books, Helene writes:

14 East 95th St.
New York City
December 8, 1949

Sir [Frank Doel]:

(It feels witless to keep writing "Gentlemen" when the same solitary soul is obviously taking care of everything for me.)

Savage Landor arrived safely...I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.

I enclose a dollar which Brian (British boy friend of Kay upstairs) says will cover the /8/ I owe you, you forgot to translate.

Now then. Brian told me you are all rationed to 2 ounces of meat per family per week and one egg per person per month and I am simply appalled. He has a catalogue from a British firm here which flies food from Denmark to his mother, so I am sending a small Christmas present to Marks & Co. I hope there will be enough to go round, he says the Charing Cross Road bookshops are "all quite small."

I'm sending it c/o you, FPD, whoever you are.

Noel.

Helene Hanff
----

Reply letter from Frank to Helene:

20th December, 1949

Miss Helene Hanff
14 East 95th Street
New York 28, New York
U.S.A

Dear Miss Hanff,

Just a note to let you know that your gift parcel arrived safely today and the contents have been shared out between the staff. Mr. Marks and and Mr. Cohen insisted that we divide it up among ourselves and not include "the bosses." I should just like to add that everything in the parcel was something that we either never see or can only be had through black market. It was extremely kind and generous of you to think of us in this way and we are all extremely grateful.

We all wish to express our thanks and send our greetings and best wishes for 1950.

Yours faithfully,

Frank Doel
For MARKS & CO.
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It seems three months passes before the next letter, sent by Helene. I love this letter for Helene's brazen outspokenness and flirty wit:

14th East 95th St.

March 25, 1950

Frank Doel, what are you DOING over there, you are not doing ANYthing, you are just sitting AROUND.

Where is Leigh Hunt? Where is the Oxford Verse? Where is the Vulgate and dear goofy John Henry, I thought they'd be such nice uplifting reading for Lent and NOTHING do you send me.

you[sic] leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don't belong to me, some day they'll find out I did it and take my library card away.

I have made arrangements with the Easter bunny to bring you an Egg, he will get over there and find you have died of Inertia.

I require a book of love poems with spring coming on. No Keats or Shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbering -- Wyatt or Jonson or somebody, use your own judgement. Just a nice book preferably small enough to stick in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park.

Well, don't just sit there! Go find it! I swear I don't know how that shop keeps going.
---

These two letters (the last I will post) are from and to Cecily Farr, a female shop assistant of Marks & Co. I find them charming, and a bit heartbreaking really:

MARKS & CO., BOOKSELLERS
84, Charing Cross Road
London, W.C. 2

7th April, 1950

Dear Miss Hanff,

Please don't let Frank know I'm writing this but every time I send you a bill I've been dying to slip in a little note and he might not think it quite proper of me. That sounds stuffy and he's not, he's quite nice really, very nice in fact, it's just that he does rather look on you as his private correspondent as all your letters and parcels are addressed to him. But I just thought I would write to you on my own.

We all love your letters and try to imagine what you must look like. I've decided you're young and very sophisticated and smart-looking. Old Mr. Martin thinks you must be quite studious-looking in spite of your wonderful sense of humor. Why don't you send us a snapshot? We should love to have it.

If you're curious about Frank, he's in his late thirties, quite nice-looking, married to a very sweet Irish girl, I believe she's his second wife.

Everyone was so grateful for the parcel. My little ones (girl 5, boy 4) were in Heaven -- with the raisins and egg I was actually able to make them a cake!

I do hope you don't mind my writing. Please don't mention it when you write to Frank.

With best wishes,

Cecily Farr

P.S. I shall put my home address on the back of this in case you should ever want anything sent you from London.

C.F.
---

14 East 95th St.

April 10, 1950

Dear Cecily --

And a very bad cess to Old Mr. Martin, tell him I'm so unstudious I never even went to college. I just happen to have peculiar taste in books, thanks to a Cambridge professor named Quiller-Couch, known as Q, whom I fell over in a library when I was 17. And I'm about as smart-looking as a Broadway panhandler. I live in moth-eaten sweaters and wool slacks, they don't give us any heat here in the daytime. It's a 5-story brownstone and all the other tenants go out to work at 9 A.M. and don't come home till 6 -- and why should the landlord heat the building for one small script-reader/writer working at home on the ground floor?

Poor frank, I give him such a hard time. I'm always bawling him out for something. I'm only teasing, but I know he'll take me seriously. I keep trying to puncture that proper British reserve, if he gets ulcers I did it.

Please write and tell me about London, I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in St. Paul's where John Donne preached and sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and like that. A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for. I told him I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he said:

"Then it's there."

Regards --

Helene Hanff
---

Helene's aspiration to visit London came true over 20 years after this last letter -- finally able to make enough money to pay for the journey -- but by then Frank had died of appendicitis and the shop as it was during her years of correspondence was abandoned.



There is a movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road, starring Anthony Hopkins as Frank, Anne Bancroff as Helene, and Judi Dench -- in her first film -- as Frank's wife.

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Hanff, Helene. 84, Charing Cross Road. Grossman Publishers, New York: 1970.