I must be fair to Hanff, in case you’re reading this exchange and thinking her (and her punctuation) monstrous. I promise to look at the next reasonably priced copy that comes along, and if it contains the passage you mention in your letter I will send it along.Īs you see – their styles are somewhat different. I was honestly under the impression that it was the complete Braybrooke edition and I can understand how you must have felt when your favourite passages missing. THEN i will rip up this ersatz book page by page, AND WRAP THINGS IN IT.įirst of all, let me apologize for the Pepys.

I enclose two limp singles, i will make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. pen’s son that was giving everybody so much with his Quaker notions? ONE mention does he get in this whole pseudo-book, and me from philadelphia. 12 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and round the bedroom with a red-hot poker? This is not pepys’ diary, this is some busybody editor’s miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys’ diary may he rot. WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’ DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS? Here is an example of excerpts from two letters that they sent each other in October 1951: In her second letter Hanff writes ‘I hope “madam” doesn’t mean over there what it does here.’ That is a sign of things to come the first spark of her personality.Īs the exchange goes on, she becomes sparkier. It starts in a fairly businesslike fashion – she writes off to them with a list Frank Doel sends back the books he can find (even going to the extent of seeking out anthologies containing specific essays she requests – not something that would happen today, one suspects!). In the days before the Internet, she didn’t let the Atlantic get in the way of finding the books she wanted. This area of London is renowned for its secondhand and antiquarian bookshops (though no.84 is now, I am sad to say, a Pizza Hut) and Hanff found their advert in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1949. It is the non-fiction letters between Hanff and Frank Doel, who worked in Marks & Co bookshop on Charing Cross Road. There can’t be many bibliophiles who aren’t already aware of this gem, but for the sake of this review I will assume there are some.

And, of course, 84 Charing Cross Road appears in the latter category. Either they are an introduction to brilliant memoirs that were undiscoverable and unknown, or they give the opportunity to have much-loved classics in that inimitably lovely series. Slightly Foxed Editions – and I never tire of saying how beautiful they are – offer two different, wonderful things to the world.

Helene hanff books