Such a gem!! What started as a casual correspondence to inquire about a rare book slowly became a friendship spanning twenty years. Even in pure epistolary form, we are able to grasp the heart-warming relationship that developed soon after the initial business transaction that transpired between the author (working as a writer in New York City) and the staff (notably Frank Doel) of Marks and Company, a small bookshop located at 84 Charing Cross Road in London . So endearing!
'Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase "antiquarian booksellers" scare me somewhat, as I equate "antique" with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes & Noble's grimy marked-up schoolboy copies.'(1)
'Please write and tell me about London, I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in St. Paul's where John Donne preached and sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and like that. A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for. I told him I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he said: "Then it's there."'(13)
'The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I'm just beginning to recover. I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it's a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All the gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman's leather easy chair -- not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.'(17)
'Yorkshire pudding out of this world, we have nothing like it, I had to describe it to somebody as a high, curved, smooth, empty waffle.'(21)
'I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.'(27)
'It's the loveliest old shop straight out of Dickens, you would go absolutely out of your mind over it.
There are stalls outside and I stopped and leafed through a few things just to establish myself as a browser before wandering in. It's dim inside, you smell the shop before you see it, it's a lovely smell, I can't articulate it easily, but it combines must and dust and age, and walls of wood and floors of wood.'(28)
'you better watch out. i'm coming over there in 54 if ellery is renewed. i'm gonna climb up that victorian book-ladder and disturb the dust on the top of the shelves and everybody's decorum. Or didn't I ever tell you I write arty murders for Ellery Queen on television? All my scripts have artistic backgrounds -- ballet, concert hall, opera -- and all the suspects and corpses are cultured. maybe i'll do one about the rare book business in your honor, you want to be the murderer or the corpse?'(47)
'My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the best sellers, they get through them as fast as possible, I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don't remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON'T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not? I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.'(54)
'There's a building going up across the street, the sign over it says:
One and Two Bedroom Apartments
At Rents That Make Sense
Rents do NOT make sense. And prices do not sit around being reasonable about anything, no matter what it says in the ad -- which isn't an ad any more it's A Commercial.... i go through life watching the english language being raped before me face. like miniver cheevy, i was born too late.... and like miniver cheevy i cough and call it fate and go on drinking.'(69)
'I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he nodded and said "It's there."... Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Looking around the rug one thing's for sure: it's here.'(94)
'If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.'(94)
'If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.'(94)
a Penguin books edition
97 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for : 100+ Reading Challenge
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