Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road (1970) isn’t my usual slice of pizza, but it came to my attention during a conversation with a trusted friend whose loaner copy sucked me in with surprising ease. The book is essentially a collection of letters exchanged between the author and the staff of a bookshop in London. Across the span of twenty years, Hanff’s feisty missives win over the staff of the shop, especially the cerebral, gentlemanly Frank Doel, whose return letters increasingly thaw from quiet professionalism to genuine friendship as he warms to Hanff’s perverse sense of humor.
It’s an unusual, short read, a series of choppy epistolary exchanges unfolding as a long-distance love affair between a quirky New York writer and her distant friends across the pond. Most of the British personalities involved are inferred between the lines of politeness, as perfunctory business exchanges slowly become more personal. Meanwhile, the feisty Hanff, relentless in her pursuit of obscure volumes, gradually draws them out of their stoic shells, which have been hardened by the privations of post-war England. The historical insights are interesting, detailing conditions in both England and the U.S. from 1949 into the late sixties, but the real hook is its very simple story: one of simple friendship forming between people with a shared love of the written word, carried out entirely through the same. Evidently, for all Hanff’s voracious reading she didn’t are much for fiction, but that doesn’t prevent her, here, from assembling an enchanting story.