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Literary Criticism.
Nonfiction.
This charming classic love story, first published in 1970, brings together twenty years of correspondence between Helene Hanff, at the time, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London at 84, Charing Cross Road. Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share a winsome, sentimental friendship based on their common love for books. Their relationship, captured so acutely in these letters, is one that has touched the hearts of thousands of readers around the world.… (more)
sfelber: Another book about books-this time the book selling business. A fascinating read. This memoir by Wendy Werris details her life from working in a San Francisco book store as a kid to becoming an independent book rep. A true behind-the-scene view for bibliophiles.… (more)
I have a weakness for books about bookshops and booksellers, so I decided to read this book after a customer asked for it and we came up with two copies.
Having only vague recollections of the movie being advertised many years ago; I had no idea this was a true collection of letters. Even more pleasing... I was wrong in my assumption that this was a light romance (ala Notting Hill.) The actual truth of the story was far more moving.
I think Helen Hanff has joined the list of Dead People I Wish I'd Known. What an odd, interesting woman she seems to have been!
Reading this was a truly delightful way to spend and hour or two on this quiet Sunday afternoon! ( )
84, Charing Cross Road, is the true story of Helene Hanff, a comedy script-reader in Manhattan during WWII, who saw an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature for a London bookstore that does mail order. The book is largely comprised of letters the outgoing Helene and Frank P. Doel, the resevered bookseller who works at Marks & Co., on Charing Cross Road, wrote to each other over a number of decades, with a few other letters as glorious garnishes. This book and it's film version, (starring the ever brillant Anne Bancroft and Sir Anthony Hopkins), always manages to make me laugh and then weep. Once I watched the film twice in a row to see if I'd become immune, but no, it chokes me up to tears EVERY time. ( )
Maybe it’s just me, but I did not get this book. It is comprised solely of letters back and forth from Helene Hanff, a freelance writer in New York and Marks & Company, a bookseller in England. She requests books, they send them to her with an invoice and she remits payment back, repeat, ad nauseam. Over time, the letters back and forth become more personal, and then they just end.
Fortunately, the book is under 100 pages, so I did not waste a lot of time reading it. This was one of the most useless and boring books I have ever read. ( )
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of what may be the most unlikely New York Times bestseller ever: Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road. ...84 Charing Cross Road is a perfect example of why you can't judge a book by its cover, its length, or the unorthodox nature of its content. Ultimately what makes the book work is what makes any book work, whether fiction or nonfiction: the relationships between the characters....84 Charing Cross Road is at its core a book about lovers of books, and is at the same time one of the funniest and most touching books you'll ever read
Gentlemen: Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books.
Quotations
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. [54]
I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me. [7]
It [the Book Lover's Anthology] 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. [56]
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? [61]
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." [13]
This is the main work - Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road (unabridged). Please do not combine with omnibus/combined editions, anthologies or abridged editions.
The UK edition titled 84 Charing Cross Road, ISBN 0860074382, 1844085244 and 1860498507, is actually an omnibus edition of this title and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Works identified as this omnibus should NOT be combined with this work, 84 Charing Cross Road.
Publisher's editors
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Original language
Information from the German Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.
Literary Criticism.
Nonfiction.
This charming classic love story, first published in 1970, brings together twenty years of correspondence between Helene Hanff, at the time, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London at 84, Charing Cross Road. Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share a winsome, sentimental friendship based on their common love for books. Their relationship, captured so acutely in these letters, is one that has touched the hearts of thousands of readers around the world.
▾Library descriptions
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Book description
VIRAGO EDITION: Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase 'antiquarian book-sellers' scares me somewhat, as I equate 'antique' with expensive. 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.
So begins the delightfully reticent love affair between Miss Helene Hanff of New York and Messrs Marks and Co, sellers of rare and secondhand books, at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. For twenty years this outspoken New York writer and Frank Doel, a rather more restrained London bookseller, carry on an increasingly touching correspondence to the point where, in early December, 1949, Helene is suddenly worried that the six-pound ham she's sent off to augment British rations will arrive in a kosher office. Soon they are sharing more personal news about Frank's family and Hanff's career. No doubt their letters would have continued, but in 1969 the firm's secretary informed Helene that Frank Doel had died. In the collection's penultimate entry, Helene Hanff urges a tourist friend, 'If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me. I owe it so much.'