I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books…” says Helene Hanff, in the first ever letter she sends to Marks & Co., booksellers at 84, Charing Cross Road in London. The date of the letter is October 5, 1949. It’s a letter that would start a romance, quite literally a literary romance, between Hanff and the staff of Marks & Co. that would last for two decades.
Eventually, the letters between the two — Hanff lived in New York so this was very much a cross-Atlantic relationship — would be published as 84 Charing Cross Road, probably one of the most charming books about books and those who read them and sell them.
Hanff was a jobbing writer — working in theatre and later, the first wave of scripted dramas at the dawn of the television age. She also wrote books for children and articles for the New Yorker and Harper’s. However, it would be these short, snappy pieces of correspondence that she exchanged with Frank Doel, Megan Wells, Mary Boulton and other staff members of Marks & Co. that catapulted her to literary stardom.
Reading 84 Charing Cross Road now is akin to stepping into a time machine — we might think of the post-war years in the West as one of prosperity and creativity, but it was also a time of rationing and scraping by on small incomes. But even within those limited means (and Hanff is refreshingly forthright about her unstable earnings) it was possible to indulge in buying a rare book or first edition from time to time and gradually build up a collection.
While the relationship between Hanff and the bookshop starts off with orders for out-of-print books, it soon turns into an exchange of personal news and festive gifts and treats. Hanff sends ham and dried eggs to the booksellers so that they can have an indulgent Christmas in a Britain where foodstuff is still being rationed. One of the staff’s neighbours embroiders a gift for Hanff in exchange. Marks & Co. staff always wish, in their letters, that Hanff would come over to London so that they can show her the city she so admires. But Hanff was not able to afford the trip until long after Marks & Co. itself had downed shutters. It was the publication of 84 Charing Cross Road that allowed her the means, finally, to make the trip and this is captured in the follow-up book, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.
In it, Hanff, now middle-aged but with her peppery wit sharper than ever, meets up with the surviving staff and their families. Given her anglophilia, I was expecting (and even dreading) that Hanff would turn saccharine and paint England in colours of chocolate-box nostalgia, but I needn’t have worried. She has ruthless clarity about the English class system and pretensions and doesn’t mind that not everything lives up to what she had long imagined them to be. 84 Charing Cross Road is a delight — a book about books and the worlds they open up, about friendships and time and the small joys of life.
The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.
That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.