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Literary Review
84 Charing Cross Road
Pradeep Sebastian
SOMETIMES I think if book lovers around the world know why and how they love books, it's because of Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road. It was the first entry in a genre that is now called Books About Books. Before 84, there were small essays on browsing for books in old bookshops in various anthologies but this was the first book that recorded — wittily, affectionately and accurately — what books really meant to a passionate reader. 84 is also about our almost sacred love for second-hand books and bookshops. Hanff spoke for book lovers everywhere when she wrote: "I do love second-hand books that open to the page some previous owner has read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to `I hate to read new books', and I hollered `Comrade!' to whoever opened it before me." Elsewhere in the book she says: "I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to."
First published in 1971 as a slim, elegant volume of 86 letters (from 1949-1969), 84 is the account of a New York bibliophile's love affair with an antiquarian bookshop in London.
14 East 95th St.
New York City
October 5, 1949
Marks & Co.
84, Charing Cross Road
London . W.C.2
England
Gentleman:
Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books... I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes and Noble's grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.
I enclose a list of my most pressing problems. If you have clean secondhand copies of any books on the list, for no more than $5.00 each, will you consider this a purchase order and send them to me?
Very truly yours,
Helene Hanff
* * *
Marks &Co, Booksellers
25th October, 1949
Dear Madam,
In reply to your letter of October 5th, we have managed to clear up two thirds of your problem. The three Hazlitt essays you want are contained in the Nonesuch Press edition... we haven't the Latin Bible you describe but we have a Latin New Testament, also a Greek New Testament, ordinary modern editions in cloth binding. Would you like these?
Your faithfully.
FPD
For Marks &CO.
The second hand shop itself is described as "the loveliest old shop straight out of Dickens... the shelves go on forever. They go up to the ceiling and they're very old and kind of grey, like old oak that has absorbed so much dust over the years they no longer are their true colour." The passages in the book that resonate most are when Hanff is talking of the physical pleasure of possessing books. "The book arrived safely, the Stevenson is so fine it embarrasses my orange-crate bookshelves, I'm almost afraid to handle such soft vellum and heavy cream coloured pages. Being used to the dead-white paper and stiff cardboardy covers of American books, I never knew a book could be such a joy to the touch." 84 Charing Cross Road was subsequently made into a hit play and then a successful movie in 1986, starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. It proved you can make a movie out of a bunch of letters. The film had the tricky job of having to keep the contents of the letters (they are the plot) and dramatise it. Scriptwriter Hugh Witemoore and director David Jones solve this by having Helene Hanff read her letters aloud as she types them. From the bookshop end, Frank Doel replies even as he busies himself hunting for the books on the shelf. Later, the film drops this altogether and has them talking directly to each other as they face the camera, as though they were addressing each other through us, the audience. Both Bancroft and Hopkins are perfect for the part and the supporting cast of unknown English actors who fill up the Marks &Co bookshop are a delight, too.
Anne Bancroft bangs away at her typewriter, looking up occasionally into the camera and saying things like: "he has a first edition of Newman's Idea of a University for six bucks, do I want it, he asks innocently. 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 — ! and "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? I require a book of love poems with spring coming on. No Keats or Shelly, send me poets who can make love without slobbering ... just a nice book preferably small enough to stick in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park. Well don't just sit there! I swear I don't know how that shop keeps going."
Anthony Hopkins on the other end stands still, gazing not into the camera but through it, replying: "The truth is that I have been chasing round the country in and out of various stately homes of England trying to buy a few books to fill up our sadly depleted stock... I remember you asked me for a volume of Elizabethan poems some time ago — well, this is the nearest I can get to it."
Our love of books, Hanff seems to be saying, creates community — an invisible community that we can nevertheless feel part of. Also, books are community. Hanff once remarks to her friend, pointing to her shelves, that she feels all these lovely old books she has been collecting should belong in some posh English manor and her friend says: "If I were these books, I'd want to belong right here."
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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