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84, Charing Cross Road

Amazon.com Price:  $11.20 (as of 23/04/2019 01:43 PST- Details)

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Description

This charming classic love story, first published in 1970, brings together twenty years of correspondence between Helene Hanff, at the time, a freelance creator living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London at 84, Charing Cross Road. Over the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share a winsome, sentimental friendship based on their common love for books. Their relationship, captured so acutely in these letters, is one that has touched the hearts of thousands of readers all over the world.

“84, Charing Cross Road will beguile and put you in tune with mankind… It’ll provide an emollient for the spirit and sheath for the exposed nerve.” — The New York Times

“A unique, throat-lumping, side-splitting treasure.” — San Francisco Examiner
84, Charing Cross Road is a charming record of bibliophilia, cultural difference, and imaginative sympathy. For 20 years, an outspoken New York creator and a quite more restrained London bookseller carried on an more and more touching correspondence. In her first letter to Marks & Co., Helene Hanff encloses a wish list, but warns, “The phrase ‘antiquarian booksellers’ scares me fairly, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive.” Twenty days later, on October 25, 1949, a correspondent identified only as FPD let Hanff know that works by Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson would be coming under separate cover. When they arrive, Hanff is ecstatic–but unsure she’ll ever conquer “bilingual arithmetic.” By early December 1949, Hanff is suddenly worried that the six-pound ham she’s sent off to augment British rations will arrive in a kosher office. But only when FPD turns out to have an actual name, Frank Doel, does the real fun begin.

Two years later, Hanff is outraged that Marks & Co. has dared to send an abridged Pepys diary. “i enclose two limp singles, i can make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. THEN i can rip up this ersatz book, page by page, AND WRAP THINGS IN IT.” Nonetheless, her postscript asks whether they would like fresh or powdered eggs for Christmas. Soon they are sharing news of Frank’s family and Hanff’s career. No doubt their letters would have continued, but in 1969, the firm’s secretary informed her that Frank Doel had died. In the collection’s penultimate entry, Helene Hanff urges a tourist friend, “If you happen to pass by 84, Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me. I owe it so much.”

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