Free 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

THINGS IN IT.” Nonetheless, her postscript asks whether they want fresh or powdered eggs for Christmas. Soon they’re sharing news of Frank’s family and Hanff’s career. No doubt their letters would have continued, but in 1969, the firm’s secretary informed her 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.“
    —Amazon.com

    Helene Hanff will always be associated with what is, undoubtedly, her most endearing and enduring book, 84 Charing Cross Road (1971); yet this slim volume of correspondence between herself and Marks & Co., an antiquarian bookshop in London, was written at the lowest point in her career.
    For years, as she was later to describe in Underfoot in Show Business (1961), she had been writing plays that never got produced, while eking out a precarious existence reading scripts for Paramount Pictures, writing articles for encyclopaedias, television scripts, and children’s history books; until one evening she sat down to take stock of herself and her future. “I was a failed playwright. I was nowhere. I was nothing.”
    It was into this void that there came the news of the death of Frank Doel of Marks & Co. from whom for over 20 years she had been ordering books she could ill afford, but which had given her a link with England. “Coming when it did the news was devastating. It seemed to me that the last anchor in my life—my bookshop—was taken from me. I began to cry and I couldn’t stop.” It was then that she realised that she had to write the story of her relationship with the shop and, in particular, with Frank Doel.
    Published in 1971, the book became an overnight success and, even more surprisingly, a cult book. Once, in conversation with me, she referred to it as “my little nothing book; I thought I was writing a New Yorker story when I wrote it. I still think it is a nice little short story.”
    —James Rouse-Evans, The Independent

    First published in 1970, the epistolary work 84, Charing Cross Road chronicles her 20 years of correspondence with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for Marks & Co., a London bookshop, on which she depended for the obscure classics and British literature titles around which her passion for self-education revolved. She became intimately involved in the lives of the shop’s staff, sending them food parcels during Britain’s postwar shortages and sharing with them details of her life in Manhattan.
    Due to financial difficulties and an aversion to travel, she put off visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix and the bookshop eventually closed. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street . In Duchess , Hanff describes her visits with friends and fans to various locations and places of literary and historical interest in London and Southern England. This trip was a highlight of her life—her modesty and sense of humor are evident as she talks about the friends, including Frank Doel’s wife, Nora, and daughter, Sheila, who were so devoted to her because of 84 Charing Cross Road , and her love of London.
    In the 1987 film adaptation, 84 Charing Cross Road , Hanff was played by Anne Bancroft, while Anthony Hopkins took the part of Frank Doel. Anne Jackson had earlier played Hanff and Frank Finlay Doel in a 1975 adaptation of the book for British television. Ellen Burstyn recreated the role on Broadway in 1982 at the Nederlander Theater in New York City. Elaine Stritch also played Helene Hanff in a television adaptation of 84, Charing Cross Road .
    Hanff never married. In the 1987 movie, a photo of a US serviceman is shown in her apartment during the period of World War II, a portrait at which she smiles fondly, suggesting to the viewer