84, Charing Cross Road (7 page)

So break it to me gently: how hard is it going to be to find me John Donne’s Complete Sermons and how much is it going to cost?

i am going to bed. i will have hideous nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labelled Excerpt, Selection, Passage and Abridged.

yrs,
h. hfffffffffffffff

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

5th March, 1960

Miss Helene Hanff
305 East 72nd Street
New York 21, New York
U.S.A.

Dear Helene,

I have delayed answering your last two letters until I had some good news to report. I have managed to obtain a copy of the Bernard Shaw-Ellen Terry correspondence. It is not a very attractive edition but it is a good clean copy and I thought I had better send it as this is quite a popular book and it might be quite some time before another copy comes along. The price is approximately $2.65 and you have a credit with us of 50 cents.

I am afraid the complete Donne
Sermons
can be had only by buying Donne’s
Complete Works
. This runs to more than 40 volumes and would be very expensive if in good condition.

We hope you had a good Christmas and New Year in spite of the Giant Modern Library.

Nora joins me in sending best wishes.

Sincerely,
Frank

Helene Hanff
    305 East 72nd Street, New York 21, N.Y.

May 8, 1960

M. De Tocqueville’s compliments and he begs to announce his safe arrival in America. He sits around looking smug because everything he said was true, especially about lawyers running the country. i belong to a Democratic club, there were fourteen men over there the other night, eleven of them lawyers. came home and read a couple of newspaper stories about the presidential hopefuls—stevenson, humphrey, kennedy, stassen, nixon—all lawyers but humphrey.

I enclose three bucks, it’s a beautiful book and you can’t even call it secondhand, the pages weren’t cut. Did I tell you I finally found the perfect page-cutter? It’s a pearl-handled fruit knife. My mother left me a dozen of them, I keep one in the pencil cup on my desk. Maybe I go with the wrong kind of people but i’m just not likely to have twelve guests all sitting around simultaneously eating fruit.

cheers
hh

Helene Hanff
    305 East 72nd Street, New York 21, N.Y.

February 2, 1961

Frank?
You still there?

i swore i wouldn’t write till i got work.

Sold a story to Harper’s Magazine, slaved over it for three weeks and they paid me $200 for it. Now they’ve got me writing the story of my life in a book. they’re “advancing” me $1,500 to write it and they figure it shouldn’t take me more than six months. I don’t mind for myself but the landlord worries.

so I can’t buy any books but back in October somebody introduced me to Louis the Duke de Saint-Simon in a miserable abridgement, and I tore around to the Society Library where they let you roam the stacks and lug everything home, and got the real thing. Have been wallowing in Louis ever since. The edition I’m reading is in six volumes and halfway through Vol. VI last night I realized I could not supPORT the notion that when I take it back I will have NO louis in the house.

The translation I’m reading is by Francis Arkwright and it’s delightful but I’ll settle for any edition you can find that you trust. DO NOT MAIL IT! just buy it and let me know what it costs and keep it there and I’ll buy it from you one volume at a time.

Hope Nora and the girls are fine. And you. And anybody else who knows me.

Helene

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

15 February, 1961

Miss Helene Hanff
305 East 72nd Street
New York 21, N.Y.

Dear Helene,

You will be pleased to know that we have a copy of the
Memoirs of the Duke de Saint-Simon
in stock in the Arkwright translation, six volumes nicely bound and in very good condition. We are sending them off to you today and they should arrive within a week or two. The amount due on them is approximately $18.75 but please don’t worry about paying it all at once. Your credit will always be good at Marks & Co.

It was very good to hear from you again. We are all well, and still hoping to see you in England one of these days.

Love from us all,
Frank

Helene Hanff
    305 East 72nd Street, New York 21, N.Y.

March 10, 1961

Dear Frankie—

Enclosed-please-God-please-find a $10 bill, it better get there, not many of those float in here these days but louis wanted me to get him paid off, he got so tired of the deadbeats at court he didn’t want to move in with one 270 years later.

Thought of you last night, my editor from Harper’s was here for dinner, we were going over this story-of-my-life and we came to the story of how I dramatized Landor’s “Aesop and Rhodope” for the “Hallmark Hall of Fame.” Did I ever tell you that one? Sarah Churchill starred as Landor’s dewy-eyed Rhodope. The show was aired on a Sunday afternoon. Two hours before it went on the air, I opened the New York Times Sunday book review section and there on page 3 was a review of a book called
A House Is Not a Home
by Polly Adler, all about whorehouses, and under the title was the photo of a sculptured head of a Greek girl with a caption reading: “Rhodope, the most famous prostitute in Greece.” Landor had neglected to mention this. Any scholar would have known Landor’s Rhodope was the Rhodopis who took Sappho’s brother for every dime he had but I’m not a scholar, I memorized Greek endings one stoic winter but they didn’t stay with me.

So we were going over this anecdote and Gene (my editor) said “Who is Landor?” and I plunged into an enthusiastic explanation—and Gene shook her head and cut in impatiently:

“You and your Olde English books!”

You see how it is, frankie, you’re the only soul alive who understands me.

xx

hh

p.s. Gene’s Chinese.

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

14th October, 1963

Miss Helene Hanff
305 East 72nd Street
New York 21, N.Y.
U.S.A.

Dear Helene,

You will no doubt be surprised to learn that the two volumes of Virginia Woolf’s
Common Reader
are on their way to you. If you want anything else I can probably get it for you with the same efficiency and swiftness.

We are all well and jogging along as usual. My eldest daughter Sheila (24) suddenly decided she wanted to be a teacher so threw up her secretarial job two years ago to go to college. She has another year to go so it looks as though it will be a long time before our children will be able to keep us in luxury.

Love from all here,
Frank

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

9th November, 1963

Miss Helene Hanff
305 East 72nd Street
New York 21, New York
U.S.A.

Dear Helene,

Some time ago you asked me for a modern version of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
. I came across a little volume the other day which I thought you would like. It is not complete by any means, but as it is quite a cheap book and seems to be a fairly scholarly job, I am sending it along by Book Post today, price $1.35. If this whets your appetite for Chaucer and you would like something more complete later on, let me know and I will see what I can find.

Sincerely,
Frank

saturday

All right, that’s enough Chaucer-made-easy, it has the schoolroom smell of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.

I’m glad I read it. i liked reading about the nun who ate so dainty with her fingers she never dripped any grease on herself. I’ve never been able to make that claim and I use a fork. Wasn’t anything else that intrigued me much, it’s just stories, I don’t like stories. Now if Geoffrey had kept a diary and told me what it was like to be a little clerk in the palace of richard III—THAT I’d learn Olde English for. I just threw out a book somebody gave me, it was some slob’s version of what it was like to live in the time of Oliver Cromwell—only the slob didn’t live in the time of Oliver Cromwell so how the hell does he know what it was like? Anybody wants to know what it was like to live in the time of Oliver Cromwell can flop on the sofa with Milton on his pro side and Walton on his con, and they’ll not only tell him what it was like, they’ll take him there.

“The reader will not credit that such things could be,” Walton says somewhere or other, “but I was there and I saw it.”

that’s for me, I’m a great lover of I-was-there books.

I enclose two bucks for the chaucer, that leaves me a credit with you of 65c which is a larger credit than I have anywhere else.

xx

h

Helene Hanff
    305 East 72nd Street, New York 21, N.Y.

March 30, 1964

Dear Frank—

l take time out from a children’s history book (my fourth, would you believe?) to ask if you can help a friend. He has an incomplete set of Shaw in what he insists is just called the Standard Edition. It’s bound in rust-colored cloth, he says, if that helps. I enclose a list of what he
has
, he wants all the others in the set but if you have more than a few, don’t send them all at once. He’ll buy them piecemeal, like me he’s a pauper. Send them to him direct, to the address on the list. That’s 32nd
Avenue
in case you can’t read it.

Do you ever hear anything of Cecily or Megan?

best
helene

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

14th April, 1964

Miss Helene Hanff
305 East 72nd Street
New York 21, New York.
U.S.A.

Dear Helene,

About the Shaw for your friend, the Standard Edition is still available from the publishers, it is bound in the rust-coloured cloth as he describes and I think there are about 30 volumes in the complete set. Used copies seldom come along but if he would like us to send him new copies we shall be glad to do so and could send him three or four volumes a month.

We have not heard from Cecily Farr in some years now. Megan Wells had enough of South Africa in a very short time and did stop in to give us a chance to say I-told-you-so, before going out to try her luck in Australia. We had a Christmas card from her a few years ago but nothing recently.

Nora and the girls join me in sending love,

Frank

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

4th October, 1965

Miss Helene Hanff
305 East 72nd Street
New York 21, New York
U.S.A.

Dear Helene,

It was good to hear from you again. Yes, we’re still here, getting older and busier but no richer.

We have just managed to obtain a copy of E. M. Delafield’s
Diary of a Provincial Lady
, in an edition published by Macmillan in 1942, a good clean copy, price $2.00. We are sending it off to you today by Book Post with invoice enclosed.

We had a very pleasant summer with more than the usual number of tourists, including hordes of young people making the pilgrimage to Carnaby Street. We watch it all from a safe distance, though I must say I rather like the Beatles. If the fans just wouldn’t scream so.

Nora and the girls send their love,

Frank

Helene Hanff
    305 East 72nd Street, New York 21, N.Y.

September 30, 1968

Still alive, are we?

I’ve been writing American history books for children for four or five years. Got hung up on the stuff and have been buying American history books—in ugly, cardboardy American editions, but somehow I just didn’t think the stately homes of England would yield nice English editions of James Madison’s stenographic record of the Constitutional Convention or T. Jefferson’s letters to J. Adams or like that.

Are you a grandfather yet? Tell Sheila and Mary their children are entitled to presentation copies of my
Collected Juvenile Works
, THAT should make them rush off and reproduce.

I introduced a young friend of mine to
Pride & Prejudice
one rainy Sunday and she has gone out of her mind for Jane Austen. She has a birthday round about Hallowe’en, can you find me some Austen for her? If you’ve got a complete set let me know the price, if it’s expensive I’ll make her husband give her half and I’ll give her half.

Best to Nora and anybody else around.

Helene

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

16th October, 1968

Miss Helene Hanff
305 East 72nd Street
New York City, N.Y 10021.
U.S.A.

Dear Helene,

Yes, we are all very much alive and kicking, though rather exhausted from a hectic summer, with hordes of tourists from U.S.A., France, Scandinavia, etc., all buying our nice leather-bound books. Consequently our stock at the moment is a sorry sight, and with the shortage of books and high prices there is little hope of finding any Jane Austen for you in time for your friend’s birthday. Perhaps we will be able to find them for her for Christmas.

Nora and the girls are fine. Sheila is teaching, Mary is engaged to a very nice boy but there is little hope of them getting married for some time as neither has any money! So Nora’s hopes of being a glamorous grandmother are receding fast.

Love,
Frank

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

8th January, 1969

Miss Helene Hanff
305 E. 72nd Street
N.Y. 10021
U.S.A.

Dear Miss,

I have just come across the letter you wrote to Mr. Doel on the 30th of September last, and it is with great regret that I have to tell you that he passed away on Sunday the 22nd of December, the funeral took place last week on Wednesday the 1st of January.

He was rushed to hospital on the 15th of December and operated on at once for a ruptured appendix, unfortunately peritonitis set in and he died seven days later.