Paul's Reviews> 84, Charing Cross Road

This book is a complete delight. It is not a love story or a romance, but a series of letters between two book lovers from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Helene Hanff is a lively and outspoken New Yorker who is unable to get hold of decently bound books, especially older and slightly more obscure ones. She answers an ad and contacts Marks and Co at 84 Charing Cross Road. There Frank Doel, a very proper English bookseller responds and starts to find and send her books from the lists she sends. Hanff’s friendliness, outspokenness and sheer vivacity gradually breaks down Frank Doel’s reserve and a friendships develops. Hanff sends to London difficult to find items to London which was still in the throes of rationing (mainly foodstuffs, but also nylons for the female employees). Gradually we also hear the voices of some of the other employees, Frank’s wife Nora and their elderly next door neighbour. There is a warmth and humanity here and a solid friendship based on books; something which should warm all our hearts.
There is also, of course, the film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. My edition has a preface by Anne Bancroft (her husband, Mel Brooks, bought the film rights for her, so she could play Hanff) and an introduction by Juliet Stevenson. What is most moving of course is that Hanff and Doel never met and the book came along after his death in the late 1960s and was an immediate hit. There has also been a play and a TV adaptation. There is a new adaptation of the play touring the UK at present starring Stephanie Powers and Clive Francis.
I really did love this, it’s a meeting of bookish minds, something done by letter, which we can now do much more easily on sites like this. Hanff keeps threatening to visit, but never makes it:
“You better watch out, I’m coming over there in ’53 if Ellery is renewed. I’m gonna climb up that Victorian book-ladder and disturb the dust on the top shelves and everybody’s decorum.”
Hanff’s wit and irreverence are a constant delight:
“I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. “Which is all very well,” she said bitterly, “but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is ‘How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall’.”
A comment on the arrival of a new book:
“The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered “Comrade!” to whoever owned it before me.”
And on buying books in general:
“It’s against my principles to buy a book I haven’t read, it’s like buying a dress you haven’t tried on.”
One of my favourites!