84, Charing Cross Road (5 page)

Regards to Nora and the wage-slaves.
HH

37 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8
24–8–52

Dear Helene:

Here I am again to thank you most gratefully for our share in the wonderful parcels you so kindly sent to Marks & Co. I wish I could send you something in return.

By the way, Helene, this week we have become the proud possessors of a car, not a new one, mind you, but it goes and that’s what matters isn’t it? Now maybe you will tell us you’re paying us a call?

Mrs. Boulton put up two cousins of mine who came down from Scotland for a couple of weeks and they were very comfortable. She bedded them and I fed them. Now if by any chance you can manage the fare to England next year for the Coronation, Mrs. Boulton will see that you have a bed.

Well, I’ll say so long for now and send you our best wishes and thanks once again for the meat and eggs.

Yours sincerely,
Nora

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

26th August, 1952

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

Dear Helene,

I am writing once again to thank you on behalf of all here for your three very exciting parcels which arrived a few days ago. It is really too good of you to spend your hard-earned cash on us in this way and I can assure you that we do appreciate your kind thoughts of us.

We had about thirty volumes of Loeb Classics come in a few days ago but alas, no Horace, Sappho or Catullus.

I am taking a couple of weeks’ holiday commencing September 1, but as I have just bought a car we are completely “broke” so will have to take things easily. Nora has a sister who lives by the sea so we are hoping she will take pity on us and invite us to stay with her. It is my first car so we are all very thrilled with it—even though it is an old 1939 model. So long as it gets us to places without breaking down too often we shall be quite happy.

With all good wishes,
Frank Doel

In August 1952, Frank bought this 1939
Morris 12, then a major purchase.

14 East 95th St.
New York City
September 18, 1952

Frankie, guess who came while you were away on vacation? SAM PEPYS! Please thank whoever mailed him for me, he came a week ago, stepped out of four pages of some tabloid, three honest navy-blue volumes of him; I read the tabloid over lunch and started Sam after dinner.

He says to tell you he’s overJOYED to be here, he was previously owned by a slob who never even bothered to cut the pages. I’m wrecking them, it’s the thinnest India paper I ever saw. We call it “onion skin” over here and it’s a good name for it. But heavier paper would have taken up six or seven volumes so I’m grateful for the India. I only have three bookshelves and very few books left to throw out.

I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I’m never going to read again like I throw out clothes I’m never going to wear again. It shocks everybody. My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the best sellers, they get through them as fast as possible, I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don’t remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON’T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not? I personally can’t think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.

Trust you and Nora had a fine holiday. Mine was spent in Central Park, I had a month’s vacation from joey, my dear little dentist, he went on his honeymoon. i financed the honeymoon. Did I tell you he told me last spring I had to have all my teeth capped or all my teeth out? I decided to have them capped as I have got used to having teeth. But the cost is simply astronomical. So Elizabeth will have to ascend the throne without me, teeth are all I’m going to see crowned for the next couple of years.

i do NOT intend to stop buying books, however, you have to have SOMEthing. Will you see if you can find me Shaw’s dramatic criticism please? And also his music criticism? I think there are several volumes, just send whatever you can find, now listen, Frankie, it’s going to be a long cold winter and I baby-sit in the evenings AND I NEED READING MATTER, NOW DON’T START SITTING AROUND, GO FIND ME SOME BOOKS.

hh

14 East 95th St.
New York City
December 12, 1952

To “her friends at 84, Charing Cross Road”:

The Book-Lovers’ Anthology stepped out of its wrappings, all gold-embossed leather and gold-tipped pages, easily the most beautiful book I own including the Newman first edition. It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I’ve never read before. Like Tristram Shandy’s description of his father’s remarkable library which “contained every book and treatise which had ever been wrote upon the subject of great noses.” (Frank! Go find me
Tristram Shandy!
)

I do think it’s a very uneven exchange of Christmas presents. You’ll eat yours up in a week and have nothing left to show for it by New Year’s Day. I’ll have mine till the day I die—and die happy in the knowledge that I’m leaving it behind for someone else to love. I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some booklover yet unborn.

Thank you all. Happy New Year.

Helene

37 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8
17–12–52

Dear Helene:

So sorry I have been so long in dropping you a line. I hope you haven’t taken it too badly about Adlai. Maybe he will have better luck next time.

Mrs. Boulton says she will gladly put you up next summer if she is still alive, she says, but I don’t know of anyone of her age who is more so, I feel sure she will live to be a hundred. Anyway, we can always fix you up somewhere.

Thanks for the good things you sent us for Christmas, you are much too kind, Helene!—and if those bodies at Marks & Co. don’t give you a banquet when you come over next year, well, they deserve to be shot.

I hope you have a lovely Christmas. Cheerio for now and all our best wishes and thanks.

God bless!
Nora

14 East 95th St.
May 3, 1953

Frankie, you’ll DIE when I tell you—

First, enclosed find $3, P-and-P arrived looking exactly as Jane ought to look, soft leather, slim and impeccable.

Now then. Ellery went off the air and I was shuffling around piling up dentist bills and feeling pale when I was invited to write an outline for a TV show which dramatizes incidents from the lives of famous people. So I rushed home and did an outline of an incident from-the-life-of-a-famous-person and sent it in and they bought it and I wrote the script and they liked it and they’re gonna give me more work in the fall.

And whaddaya think I dramatized? JOHN DONNE ELOPING WITH THE BOSS’S DAUGHTER out of Walton’s Lives. Nobody who watches television has the slightest idea who John Donne was, but thanks to Hemingway
everybody
knows No Man Is An Island, all I had to do was work that in and it was sold.

So that’s how John Donne made the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” and paid for all the books you ever sent me and five teeth.

I plan to crawl out of bed before dawn on Coronation Day to attend the ceremony by radio. Will be thinking of you all.

cheers
hh

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

11th June, 1953

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

Dear Helene,

Just a note to let you know that your parcel arrived safely on June 1, just in time for our Coronation Day celebrations. We had a number of friends at home to watch TV on the day, and so the ham was most welcome to provide them with something to eat. It was delicious, and we all drank your health as well as the Queen’s.

It was most kind of you to spend your hard-earned money on us like this, and the rest of the staff join me in saying thanks a lot.

With very best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Frank Doel

Boldmere Road
Eastcote
Pinner
Middlesex
23–9–53

Helene dear,

Am dashing this off to say you must send
nothing at all
to the shop for Christmas, everything is now off rations and even nylons are available in all the better shops. Please save your money as the most important thing after your dentist is your trip to England. Only don’t come in ’54 as I shall be out of the country, come in ’55 when we shall be back and you can stay with us.

Doug writes that our “call” may come at any moment as we are next in line for married quarters. The children and I are hoping to join him before Christmas. He is well and happy on Bahrein Island in the middle of the Persian Gulf (if you’ve got an atlas) but will return to the RAF base at Habbaniya in Iraq when our quarters are available and we will join him there, all being well.

Write again soon. Even if I do “pop off” Mother will forward your letter.

Love and best wishes—
Cecily

14 East 95th St.
September 2, 1955

DO YOU MEAN TO SIT THERE AND TELL ME YOU’VE BEEN PUBLISHING THESE MAMMOTH CATALOGUES ALL THESE YEARS AND THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU EVER BOTHERED TO SEND ME ONE! THOU VARLET?

Don’t remember which restoration playwright called everybody a Varlet, I always wanted to use it in a sentence.

As it happens, the only thing which MIGHT interest me is the CatulIus, it’s not the Loeb Classics but it sounds like it’ll do. If you still have it, mail it and I’ll send you the –/6s 2d as soon as you translate it, Kay and Brian moved to the suburbs and left me without a translator.

I shall be obliged if you will send Nora and the girls to church every Sunday for the next month to pray for the continued health and strength of the messrs. gilliam, reese, snider, campanella, robinson, hodges, furillo, podres, newcombe and labine, collectively known as The Brooklyn Dodgers. If they lose this World Series I shall Do Myself In and then where will you be?

Have you got De Tocqueville’s Journey to America? Somebody borrowed mine and never gave it back. Why is it that people who wouldn’t dream of stealing anything else think it’s perfectly all right to steal books?

Regards to Megan if she’s still there. And what’s become of Cecily, is she back from Iraq?

h.h.

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

13th December, 1955

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

Dear Helene,

I feel very guilty about not writing to you before this, but you can put it down to a dose of ’flu which kept me away from the shop for a couple of weeks and a sudden rush of work since I came back.

About the Catullus in our catalogue. This was already sold before we received your letter but I have sent you an edition which contains the Latin text with a verse translation by Sir Richard Burton and also a prose translation by Leonard Smithers, printed in large type, and all for $3.78. The binding is not very handsome but it’s a good clean copy. We have no edition of De Tocqueville but will keep looking for one for you.

Megan is still here but planning to go to South Africa to live, we are all trying to talk her out of it. We have heard nothing from Cecily Farr since she went out to the East to join her husband, though they were only to be gone a year.

I shall be only too pleased to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers if you will reciprocate with a few cheers for THE SPURS (the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club to the uninitiated), who are at present languishing next to the bottom of the League. However, the season does not finish until next April so they have plenty of time to get themselves out of the mess.

Nora and all here join me in sending our best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

Sincerely,
Frank Doel

14 e. 95th st.
nyc
jan. 4, 1956

i write you from under the bed where that catullus drove me.

i mean it PASSETH understanding.

Up till now, the only Richard Burton I ever heard of is a handsome young actor I’ve seen in a couple of British movies and I wish I’d kept it that way. This one got knighted for turning Catullus—caTULLus—into Victorian hearts-and-flowers.

and poor little Mr. smithers must have been afraid his mother was going to read it, he like to KILL himself cleaning it all up.

all right, let’s just you go find me a nice plain Latin Catullus, I bought myself a Cassell’s dictionary, I’ll work out the hard passages by myself.

WILL YOU TELL MEGAN WELLS SHE IS OUT OF HER COTTONPICKING MIND? if she’s that bored with civilization why doesn’t she just move to a siberian salt mine?

certainly, certainly, glad to root for anything with Hotspur in it.