Pilgrimage to 84 Charing Cross Road

A New Yorker’s letters to a London bookshop were a big hit 50 years ago. Valerie Grove accompanied her on her first visit to Marks & Co

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Fifty years ago, in 1971, I was the ‘bouncy girl reporter’ – as she described me – who accompanied Helene Hanffon her first visit to the antiquarian bookshop Marks & Co, at the address she was about to immortalise: 84 Charing Cross Road.

In her book of that title, published in America in 1970, she simply reproduced her exchange of letters with the shop, starting in1949. The anglophile Miss Hanffwould pester Marks & Co for English classics, preferably slightly foxed.

She wrote as she spoke, in Jewish wise-cracking style. ‘Frankie,’ she would address the shop’s manager, Frank Doel, ‘it’s going to be a long cold winter AND I NEED READING MATTER – so GO FIND ME BOOKS!’

The reply from Doel, a family man from suburban Finchley, was formal. ‘Dear Madam: In reply to yours of the 5th October…’

‘I hope “madam” doesn’t mean over there what it does here,’ she retorted.

In her brownstone studio apartment in Brooklyn, she kept few books. As an autodidact, she scorned people who never threw or gave away their collections.

‘People furnish their homes with shelves full of unread books,’ she said. ‘Otherwise how wouldja know they were educated, right? I can’t think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book, or even a mediocre book.’

She preferred her books scribbled in – ‘comradely’ style – with notes in margins and inscriptions on flyleaves.

When her copy of Pepys’s diary arrived from Marks & Co, she found the previous owner was ‘a slob who never even cut the pages’.

She did the job with a pearl-handled fruit knife, one of a dozen she’d inherited.