84, Charing Cross Road

ALSO BY HELENE HANFF
Apple of My Eye
The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street
Q’s Legacy
Underfoot in Show Business

Introduction by ANNE BANCROFT

MOYER BELL LIMITED
MT.KISCO, NEW YORK

F.P.D.
In Memoriam

I’m not a writer, but this book and its author mean enough to me that I’m glad to venture a few words in celebration of its new edition.

Like the people who win our hearts, the books we come to love can introduce themselves in the strangest ways. Let me tell you about how I met
84, Charing Cross Road
. Some years ago as I was sitting on the beach on Fire Island, a man strolling by approached me. I didn’t know the fellow, so his exclamation—“I’ve just read something that would be perfect for you!”—took me by surprise.

The next day, as I sat in the same spot, he came my way again, this time with book in hand. His enthusiasm seemed so sincere I couldn’t help but be intrigued. So soon as he was gone, I opened the small volume he had delivered and started to read. That’s how my romance with
84, Charing Cross Road
began.

As many of you know—and many more, I hope, are about to find out—it’s difficult, if not impossible to start this book without finishing it. The trail of Helene Hanff’s correspondence with Frank Doel and his colleagues at Marks & Co. leads us, captivated, down one woman’s idiosyncratic path through English literature; along the way, our enjoyment in sharing her literary education is deepened by the human narrative her letters weave. This is a book which seems at first to be about other books, which of course it is, but as we get to know Helene, and through her, Frank and Nora Doel, and Cecily Farr and Megan Wells and the rest at 84 Charing Cross, we recognize that the books desired, located, sent and received are the happy vehicles for much else: conversation, friendship, affection, generosity, wit—in other words, for all the best things life can share with us.

Which brings me to just what it is about this slim book that means so much to me. The more I listened to Helene’s distinctive, wry, and winning voice, the more I heard echoes in it of another voice, that of a friend I’d been close to for many years, since, in fact, we’d been students together. Much like Helene, this friend was enchanted by books in a way that animated his every word; what resonated between Helene’s voice on the page before me and my friend’s in my memory, was the respect, need, and love for books that characterized their mutual passion. Sadly, at the time the wandering reader of Fire Island delivered
84, Charing Cross Road
into my hands, I was mourning the death of this very friend. So all the while Helene was writing to Frank Doel about Pepys and Hazlitt and Stevenson and “Q”, her words were really talking to me about this dear friend of mine, giving them a poignancy that only enriched the extraordinary charms they already possessed.

Soon after, knowing of my attachment to this book, my husband did a wonderful thing, pursuing and acquiring the film rights to it and presenting them to me as an anniversary gift. That’s how I got to play Helene on screen, and to meet her in person. If I were a better writer, I’d describe the occasion on which we all met the Queen Mother at a command performance of the movie; the image of Helene democratically offering her hand to royalty remains an indelible memory.

Now, I certainly didn’t mean to pass myself off as a reader of the stature of Helene Hanff, nor even the beachcomber who dropped her book into my lap, but it seems to me that my experience with this lovely volume reveals an awful lot about what books provide: a way of reaching out across time and space to friends and strangers, and to the absent presences that play such a large part in all our lives. In the pages that follow you’ll recognize Helene reaching out to her beloved English authors and to the many friends in and about 84, Charing Cross that these long-dead writers introduced to her. What you won’t recognize is the beachcomber speaking to me, or myself communicating with my late friend; but, believe me, there we are, right between the lines.

A
NNE
B
ANCROFT

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 editions, or in Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.

I enclose a list of my most pressing problems. If you have clean secondhand 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

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

25th October, 1949

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

Dear Madam,

In reply to your letter of October 5th, we have managed to clear up two thirds of your problem. The three Hazlitt essays you want are contained in the Nonesuch Press edition of his
Selected Essays
and the Stevenson is found in
Virginibus Puerisque
. We are sending nice copies of both these by Book Post and we trust they will arrive safely in due course and that you will be pleased with them. Our invoice is enclosed with the books.

The Leigh Hunt essays are not going to be so easy but we will see if we can find an attractive volume with them all in. We haven’t the Latin Bible you describe but we have a Latin New Testament, also a Greek New Testament, ordinary modern editions in cloth binding. Would you like these?

Yours faithfully,
FPD
For MARKS & CO.

14 East 95th St.
New York City
November 3, 1949

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

Gentlemen:

The books arrived safely, the Stevenson is so fine it embarrasses my orange-crate bookshelves, I’m almost afraid to handle such soft vellum and heavy cream-colored pages. Being used to the dead-white paper and stiff cardboardy covers of American books, I never knew a book could be such a joy to the touch.

A Britisher whose girl lives upstairs translated the £1/17/6 for me and says I owe you $5.30 for the two books. I hope he got it right. I enclose a $5 bill and a single, please use the 70c toward the price of the New Testaments, both of which I want.

Will you please translate your prices hereafter? I don’t add too well in plain American, I haven’t a prayer of ever mastering bilingual arithmetic.

Yours,
Helene Hanff

I hope “madam” doesn’t mean over there what it does here.

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

9th November, 1949

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

Dear Miss Hanff,

Your six dollars arrived safely, but we should feel very much easier if you would send your remittances by postal money order in future, as this would be quite a bit safer for you than entrusting dollar bills to the mails.

We are very happy you liked the Stevenson so much. We have sent off the New Testaments, with an invoice listing the amount due in both pounds and dollars, and we hope you will be pleased with them.

Yours faithfully,
FPD
For MARKS & CO.

14 East 95th St.
November 18, 1949

WHAT KIND OF A BLACK PROTESTANT BIBLE IS THIS?

Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose ever written, whoever told them to tinker with the Vulgate Latin? They’ll burn for it, you mark my words.

It’s nothing to me, I’m Jewish myself. But I have a Catholic sister-in-law, a Methodist sister-in-law, a whole raft of Presbyterian cousins (through my Great-Uncle Abraham who converted) and an aunt who’s a Christian Science healer, and I like to think
none
of them would countenance this Anglican Latin Bible if they knew it existed. (As it happens, they don’t know Latin existed.)

Well, the hell with it. I’ve been using my Latin teacher’s Vulgate, what I imagine I’ll do is just not give it back till you find me one of my own.

I enclose $4 to cover the $3.88 due you, buy yourself a cup of coffee with the 12c. There’s no post office near here and I am not running all the way down to Rockefeller Plaza to stand in line for a $3.88 money order. If I wait till I get down there for something else, I won’t have the $3.88 any more. I have implicit faith in the U.S. Airmail and His Majesty’s Postal Service.

Have you got a copy of Landor’s
Imaginary Conversations?
I think there are several volumes, the one I want is the one with the Greek conversations. If it contains a dialogue between Aesop and Rhodope, that’ll be the volume I want.

Helene Hanff

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

26th November, 1949

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

Dear Miss Hanff,

Your four dollars arrived safely and we have credited the 12 cents to your account.

We happen to have in stock Volume II of the Works & Life of Walter Savage Landor which contains the Greek dialogues including the one mentioned in your letter, as well as the Roman dialogues. It is an old edition published in 1876, not very handsome but well bound and a good clean copy, and we are sending it off to you today with invoice enclosed.

I am sorry we made the mistake with the Latin Bible and will try to find a Vulgate for you. Not forgetting Leigh Hunt.

Yours faithfully,
FPD
For MARKS & CO.

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

Sir:

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

Savage Landor arrived safely and promptly fell open to a Roman dialogue where two cities had just been destroyed by war and everybody was being crucified and begging passing Roman soldiers to run them through and end the agony. It’ll be a relief to turn to Aesop and Rhodope where all you have to worry about is a famine. 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 it.

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

14 East 95th St.
December 9, 1949

FPD! CRISIS!

I sent that package off. The chief item in it was a 6-pound ham, I figured you could take it to a butcher and get it sliced up so everybody would have some to take home.

But I just noticed on your last invoice it says: “B. Marks. M. Cohen.” Props.

ARE THEY KOSHER? I could rush a tongue over.