84, Charing Cross Road (2 page)

ADVISE PLEASE!
                Helene Hanff

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

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 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 the 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.

14 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 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 judgment. 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 dont know how that shop keeps going.

hh

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

7th April, 1950

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

Dear Miss Hanff,

I have to thank you for the very welcome Easter parcel which arrived safely yesterday. We were all delighted to see the tins and the box of shell eggs, and the rest of the staff joins me in thanking you for your very kind and generous thought of us.

I am sorry we haven’t been able to send you any of the books you want. About the book of love poems, now and then we do get such a volume as you describe. We have none in stock at the moment but shall look out for one for you.

Again, many thanks for the parcel.

Faithfully Yours,
Frank Doel
For MARKS & CO.

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 humour. 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

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

20 September 1950

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

Dear Miss Hanff,

It is such a long time since we wrote to you I hope you do not think we have forgotten all about your wants.

Anyway, we now have in stock the
Oxford Book of English Verse
, printed on India paper, original blue cloth binding, 1905, inscription in ink on the flyleaf but a good secondhand copy, price $2.00. We thought we had better quote before sending, in case you have already purchased a copy.

Some time ago you asked us for Newman’s
Idea of a University.
Would you be interested in a copy of the first edition? We have just purchased one, particulars as follows:

NEWMAN (JOHN HENRY, D.D.) Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education, Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin. First edition, 8 vo. calf, Dublin, 1852. A few pages a little age-stained and spotted but a good copy in a sound binding.  Price—$6.00

In case you would like them, we will put both books on one side until you have time to reply.

With kind regards,
Yours faithfully,
Frank Doel
For MARKS & CO.

14 East 95th St.
September 25 1950

he has a first edition of Newman’s University for six bucks, do I want it, he asks innocently.

Dear Frank,

Yes, I want it. I won’t be fit to live with myself. I’ve never cared about first editions per se, but a first edition of THAT book—!

oh my.

i can just see it.

Send the
Oxford Verse,
too, please. Never wonder if I’ve found something somewhere else, I don’t look anywhere else any more. Why should I run all the way down to 17th St. to buy dirty, badly made books when I can buy clean, beautiful ones from you without leaving the typewriter? From where I sit, London’s a lot closer than 17th Street.

Enclosed please God please find $8. Did I tell you about Brian’s lawsuit? He buys physics tomes from a technical bookshop in London, he’s not sloppy and haphazard like me, he bought an expensive set and went down to Rockefeller Plaza and stood in line and got a money order and cabled it or whatever you do with it, he’s a businessman, he does things right.

the money order got lost in transit.

Up His Majesty’s Postal Service!
HH

am sending very small parcel to celebrate first edition, Overseas Associates finally sent me my own catalogue.

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

2nd October, 1950

Dear Helene,

I brought the enclosed snapshots to the shop with me weeks ago, but we’ve been frightfully busy so have had no chance to send them on to you. They were taken in Norfolk where Doug (my husband) is stationed with the RAF. None of them very flattering of me, but they are the best we have of the children and the one of Doug alone is very good.

My dear, I do hope you get your wish to come to England. Why not save your pennies and come next summer? Mummy and Daddy have a house in Middlesex and would be delighted to put you up.

Megan Wells (secretary to the bosses) and I are going on a week’s holiday to Jersey (Channel Islands) in July. Why don’t you come with us and then you could economize the rest of the month in Middlesex?

Ben Marks is trying to see what I’m writing so shall have to close.

Sincerely,
Cecily

14 East 95th St.
October 15, 1950

WELL!!!

All I have to say to YOU, Frank Doel, is we live in depraved, destructive and degenerate times when a bookshop—a BOOKSHOP—starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper. I said to John Henry when he stepped out of it:

“Would you believe a thing like that, Your Eminence?” and he said he wouldn’t. You tore that book up in the middle of a major battle and I don’t even know which war it was.

The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I’m just beginning to recover. I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it’s a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman’s leather easy chair—not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.

I want the Q anthology. I’m not sure how much it was, I lost your last letter. I think it was about two bucks, I’ll enclose two singles, if I owe you more let me know.

Why don’t you wrap it in pages LCXII and LCXIII so I can at least find out who won the battle and what war it was?

HH

P.S. Have you got Sam Pepys’ diary over there? I need him for long winter evenings.

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

1st November, 1950

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

Dear Miss Hanff,

I am sorry for the delay in answering your letter but I have been away out of town for a week or so and am now busy trying to catch up on my correspondence.

First of all, please don’t worry about us using old books such as Clarendon’s Rebellion for wrapping. In this particular case they were just two odd volumes with the covers detached and nobody in their right senses would have given us a shilling for them.

The Quiller-Couch anthology,
The Pilgrim’s Way
, has been sent to you by Book Post. The balance due was $1.85 so your $2 more than covered it. We haven’t a copy of Pepys’
Diary
in stock at the moment but shall look out for one for you.

With best wishes,
Yours faithfully,
F. Doel
For MARKS & CO.

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

2nd February, 1951

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

Dear Miss Hanff,

We are glad you liked the “Q” anthology. We have no copy of the
Oxford Book of English Prose
in stock at the moment but will try to find one for you.

About the
Sir Roger de Coverley Papers
, we happen to have in stock a volume of eighteenth century essays which includes a good selection of them as well as essays by Chesterfield and Goldsmith. It is edited by Austin Dobson and is quite a nice edition and as it is only $1.15 we have sent it off to you by Book Post. If you want a more complete collection of Addison & Steele let me know and I will try to find one.

There are six of us in the shop, not including Mr. Marks and Mr. Cohen.

Faithfully yours,
Frank Doel
For MARKS & CO.

Eastcote
Pinner
Middlesex
20–2–51

Helene my dear—

There are many ways of doing it but Mummy and I think this is the simplest for you to try. Put a cup of flour, an egg, a half cup of milk and a good shake of salt into a large bowl and beat altogether until it is the consistency of thick cream. Put in the frig for several hours. (It’s best if you make it in the morning.) When you put your roast in the oven, put in an extra pan to heat. Half an hour before your roast is done, pour a bit of the roast grease into the baking pan, just enough to cover the bottom will do. The pan must be
very hot.
Now pour the pudding in and the roast and pudding will be ready at the same time.

I don’t know quite how to describe it to someone who has never seen it, but a good Yorkshire Pudding will puff up very high and brown and crisp and when you cut into it you will find that it is hollow inside.

The RAF is still keeping Doug in Norfolk and we are firmly hoarding your Christmas tins until he comes home, but my dear, what a celebration we shall have with them when he does! I do think you oughtn’t to spend your money like that!

Must fly and post this if you’re to have it for Brian’s birthday dinner, do let me know if it’s a success.

Love,
Cecily

14 East 95th St.
February 25, 1951

Dear Cecily—

Yorkshire Pudding out of this world, we have nothing like it, I had to describe it to somebody as a high, curved, smooth, empty waffle.

Please don’t worry about what the food parcels cost, I don’t know whether Overseas Asso. is non-profit or duty-free or what, but they are monstrous cheap, that whole Christmas parcel cost less than my turkey. They do have a few rich parcels with things like standing rib-roasts and legs of lamb, but even those are so cheap compared with what they cost in the butcher shops that it kills me not to be able to send them. I have such a time with the catalogue, I spread it out on the rug and debate the relative merits of Parcel 105 (includes-one-dozen-eggs-and-a-tin-of-sweet-biscuits) and Parcel 217B (two-dozen-eggs-and-NO-sweet-biscuits), I hate the one-dozen egg parcels, what is two eggs for anybody to take home? But Brian says the powdered ones taste like glue. So it’s a problem.