84, Charing Cross Road (4 page)

We are sending you a little gift for Christmas. It is linen and we do hope you will not have to pay any duty on it. We will mark it “Christmas Gift” and keep our fingers crossed. Anyway, we hope you will like it and accept it with our sincere best wishes for Christmas and the coming year.

My name is certainly not of Welsh origin. As it is pronounced to rhyme with the French word “Noel,” I think there may be a possibility that it originated in France.

Yours sincerely,
Frank Doel
For MARKS & CO.

[CARD ENCLOSED WITH HEAVILY WORKED, HAND-EMBROIDERED IRISH LINEN TABLECLOTH ]:

Christmas Greetings
and
All Good Wishes for the
New Year
from

Geo. Martin     Megan Wells    W. Humphries
Cecily Farr    Frank Doel    J. Pemberton

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

15th January, 1952

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

Dear Miss Hanff,

First of all, we were all so glad that you liked the cloth. It gave us a lot of pleasure to send it and it was one little way of thanking you for all your kind gifts over the last few years. You may be interested to know that it was embroidered, quite recently, by an old lady of over eighty who lives in the flat (apartment) next door to me. She lives all by herself and does quite a lot of needlework as a hobby. She does not often part with any of her work, but my wife managed to persuade her to sell this cloth, and I think she also made her a present of some of the dried egg you sent us which helped a lot.

If you must clean your Grolier Bible, we should advise ordinary soap and water. Put a teaspoonful of soda in a pint of warm water and use a soapy sponge. I think you will find this will remove the dirt and you can then polish it with a little lanolin.

J. Pemberton is a lady and the J. is for Janet.

With best wishes from all of us for the coming year.

Faithfully yours,
Frank Doel

37 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8
20–1–52

Dear Miss Hanff:

For a long time I have wanted to write to you to thank you for my family’s share in the wonderful food parcels you’ve been sending to Marks & Co. Now I have an excuse as Frank tells me you want to know the name and address of the old lady who embroidered your cloth. It was beautiful, wasn’t it?

Her name is Mrs. Boulton and she lives next door at No. 36 Oakfield Court. She was thrilled to know that her cloth had crossed the Atlantic and I know she would be delighted to hear how much you admired it.

Thank you for wanting to send us more dried egg, but we still have a bit left to see us through until spring. Some time between April and September we usually manage all right for eggs, as they go off ration for a time and then we do a bit of trading with the tins, as once for a special occasion I traded a tin of dried egg for a pair of nylons. Not quite legal but it does help us to get by!

I will send you snaps of my happy family one of these days. Our oldest girl was twelve last August, by name Sheila, who by the way is my ready-made daughter, as Frank lost his first wife during the war. Our youngest, Mary, was four last week. Last May, Sheila announced at school that she was sending Mummy and Daddy an anniversary card and told the nuns (it’s a convent) that we had been married four years. It took a bit of explaining as you can imagine.

I will close this with all good wishes for the New Year and especially a wish that we may see you in England one of these days.

Sincerely,
Nora Doel

36 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8
Jan. 29th, 1952

Dear Miss Hanff:

Thank you very much for the letter, I appreciate your kindness in telling me the cloth I worked has given you so much pleasure. I only wish I could do more. I expect Mrs. Doel has told you I am getting on in years so I am unable to do as much as I used to. It is always a joy to me when my work gets into the hands of someone who appreciates it.

I see Mrs. Doel most days, she often speaks of you. Perhaps I may see you if you come to England.

Again thanking you,

Yours very sincerely,
Mary Boulton

14 East 95th St.
February 9, 1952

Now listen, Maxine—

I just talked to your mother, she says you don’t think the show will run another month and she says you took two dozen pairs of nylons over there, so do me a favor. As soon as the closing notice goes up take four pairs of nylons around to the bookshop for me, give them to Frank Doel, tell him they’re for the three girls and Nora (his wife).

Your mother says I am NOT to enclose any money for them, she got them last summer at a close-out sale at Saks, they were very cheap and she’ll donate them to the shop, she’s feeling pro-British.

Wait’ll you see what the shop sent me for Christmas. It’s an Irish linen tablecloth, the color of thick cream, hand-embroidered in an old-fashioned pattern of leaves and flowers, every flower worked in a different color and shaded from very pale to very deep, you never saw anything like it. My junk-shop drop-leaf table CERTainly never saw anything like it, i get this urge to shake out my flowing Victorian sleeve and lift a graceful arm to pour tea from an imaginary Georgian teapot, we’re gonna play Stanislavski with it the minute you get home.

Ellery raised me to $250 a script, if it keeps up till June
I
may get to England and browse around my bookshop myself. If I have the nerve. I write them the most outrageous letters from a safe 3,000 miles away. i’ll probably walk in there one day and walk right out again without telling them who I am.

I fail to see why you did not understand that groceryman, he did
not
call it “ground ground nuts,” he called it “ground ground-nuts” which is the only really SENsible thing to call it. Peanuts grow in the GROUND and are therefore GROUND-nuts, and after you take them out of the ground you grind them up and you have
ground
ground-nuts, which is a much more accurate name than peanut butter, you just don’t understand English.

XXX

h. hanff
girl etymologist

P. S. Your mother is setting out bravely this morning to look at an apartment for you on 8th Avenue in the 50’s because you told her to look in the theatre district. Maxine you know perfectly well your mother is not equipped to look at ANYTHING on 8th Avenue.

14 East 95th St.
February 9, 1952

SLOTH,

i could ROT over here before you’d send me anything to read. i oughta run straight down to brentano’s which i would if anything i wanted was in print.

You may add Walton’s Lives to the list of books you aren’t sending me. It’s against my principles to buy a book I haven’t read, it’s like buying a dress you haven’t tried on, but you can’t even get Walton’s Lives in a library over here.

You can look at it. They have it down at the 42nd street branch. But not to take
home!
the lady said to me, shocked. eat it here, just sit right down in room 315 and read the whole book without a cup of coffee, a cigarette or air.

Doesn’t matter, Q quoted enough of it so I know I’ll like it. anything he liked i’ll like except if it’s fiction. i never can get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived.

what do you do with yourself all day, sit in the back of the store and read? why don’t you try selling a book to somebody?

MISS Hanff
to you.
(I’m Helene only to my FRIENDS)

P.S. tell the girls and nora if all goes well they’re getting nylons for Lent.

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

14th February, 1952

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

Dear Helene,

I quite agree it is time we dropped the “Miss” when writing to you. I am not really so stand-offish as you may have been led to believe, but as copies of letters I have written to you go into the office files the formal address seemed more appropriate. But as this letter has nothing to do with books, there will be no copy.

We are quite at a loss to know how you managed the nylons which appeared this noon as if by magic. All I can tell you is that when I came back from lunch they were on my desk with a note reading: “From Helene Hanff.” No one seems to know how or when they arrived. The girls are very thrilled and I believe they are planning to write to you themselves.

I am sorry to say that our friend Mr. George Martin who has been so ill for some time passed away in hospital last week. He was with the firm a great number of years, so with that loss and the King dying so suddenly as well, we are rather a mournful crowd at the moment.

I don’t see how we can ever repay you for your many kind gifts. All I can say is, if you ever decide to make the trip to England, there will be a bed for you at 37 Oakfield Court for as long as you care to stay.

With best wishes from us all,
Frank Doel

14 East 95th St.
New York City
March 3, 1952

Oh my, i do bless you for that Walton’s
Lives.
It’s incredible that a book published in 1840 can be in such perfect condition more than a hundred years later. Such beautiful, mellow roughcut pages they are, I do feel for poor William T. Gordon who wrote his name in it in 1841, what a crummy lot of descendants he must have—to sell it to you casually for nothing. Boy, I’d like to have run barefoot through THEIR library before they sold it.

fascinating book to read, did you know John Donne eloped with the boss’s highborn daughter and landed in the Tower for it and starved and starved and THEN got religion. my word.

Now listen, I’m enclosing a $5 bill, that
Lives
makes me very dissatisfied with my
Angler
which I bought before I met you. It’s one of those hard-faced American Classics-for-the-Masses editions, Izaak just hates it, he says he’s not going around looking like THAT for the rest of his life, so use the extra $2.50 for a nice English
Angler,
please.

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. Or didn’t I ever tell you I write arty murders for Ellery Queen on television? All my scripts have artistic backgrounds—ballet, concert hall, opera—and all the suspects and corpses are cultured. Maybe I’ll do one about the rare book business in your honor, you want to be the murderer or the corpse?

hh

36 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8
March 24th, 1952

Dear Miss Hanff:

I hardly know how to express my thanks and feelings for the lovely box of everything to eat which you have sent me which arrived today. I have never been sent a parcel before. I really don’t think you should have done it. I can only say Thank you very much, I certainly will enjoy everything.

It was very kind of you to think of me in this way. I showed them all to Mrs. Doel, she thought they were lovely.

Again Thanking you very much, and best wishes.

Yours very sincerely,
Mary Boulton

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

17th April, 1952

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

Dear Helene, (you see I don’t care about the files any more),

You will be pleased to know we have just purchased a private library which includes a very nice copy of Walton’s
Compleat Angler
and hope to have it to send you next week, price approximately $2.25 and your credit balance with us is more than enough to cover it.

Your Ellery Queen scripts sound rather fun. I wish we could have the chance of seeing some of them on our TV over here—it wants livening up a bit (our TV I mean, not your script).

Nora and all here join me in sending our best wishes,

Yours faithfully,
Frank Doel

37 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8
Sunday, May 4th, 1952

Dear Helene,

Thanks for the parcel of dried egg received on Friday and I was very glad for same, I did mention something about eggs coming off the ration, well it just hasn’t happened so the powder was a godsend for our weekend cakes, etc. Frank is taking some to the shop to send to Cecily, as he keeps forgetting to bring home her address. I expect you know she has left the shop and is waiting to join her husband in the East.

I am enclosing a few snaps, Frank says none of them do him justice, he is much better-looking; but we just let him dream.

Sheila was home for a month’s break and we have been gadding about a bit to the seaside for day trips and sight-seeing and must now pull in our horns a bit, as the cost of transport here is terrific. It is our ambition to have a car but they are so expensive and a decent secondhand one is dearer than a new one. The new ones are being exported and there are so few for the home market some of my friends have been waiting 5 to 7 years for a new car.

Sheila is going to say a “jolly good prayer” for you so you may get your wish to come to England because the tin of bacon we had from you on Easter Monday was such a treat. So if “jolly good prayers” are answered you might have a windfall and be able to come and see us soon.

Well, so long for now and thanks once again.

Nora

14 East 95th St.
New York City
May 11, 1952

Dear Frank:

Meant to write you the day the
Angler
arrived, just to thank you, the woodcuts alone are worth ten times the price of the book. What a weird world we live in when so beautiful a thing can be owned for life—for the price of a ticket to a Broadway movie palace, or 1/50th the cost of having one tooth capped.

Well, if your books cost what they’re worth I couldn’t afford them!

You’ll be fascinated to learn (from me that hates novels) that I finally got round to Jane Austen and went out of my mind over
Pride & Prejudice
which I can’t bring myself to take back to the library till you find me a copy of my own.