介绍:
If you happen to pass by 84, Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.
9th April, 1951
Dear Miss Hanff,
I expect you are getting a bit worried that we have not written to thank you for your parcels and you are probably thinking that we are an 1)ungrateful lot. The truth is that I have been chasing round the country in and out of various stately homes of England trying to buy a few books to fill up our sadly depleted stock. My wife was starting to call me the 4)lodger who just went home for bed and breakfast, but of course when I arrived home with a nice piece of MEAT, to say nothing of dried eggs and ham,
then she thought I was a fine fellow and all was forgiven. It is a long time since we saw so much meat all in one piece.
We should like to express our appreciation in some way or other, so we are sending by Book Post today a little book which I hope you will like. I remember you asked me for a volume of Elizabethan love poems some time ago—well, this is the nearest I can get to it.
Yours faithfully,
Frank Doel
For MARKS & CO.
April 16, 1951
To All at 84, Charing Cross Road:
Thank you for the beautiful book. I’ve never owned a book before with pages edged all round in gold. Would you believe it arrived on my birthday?
I wish you hadn’t been so over-courteous about putting the 7)inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It’s the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you’d decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner.
I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in 9)margins, I like the 10)comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.)
And why didn’t you sign your names? I expect Frank wouldn’t let you, he probably doesn’t want me writing love letters to anybody but him.
I send you greetings from America—faithless friend that she is, pouring millions into rebuilding Japan and Germany while letting England starve. Some day, God willing, I’ll get over there and apologize personally for my country’s sins (and by the time I come home my country will certainly have to apologize for mine).
Thank you again for the beautiful book, I shall try very hard not to get 11)gin and ashes all over it, it’s really much too fine for the likes of me.
Yours,
Helene Hanff
September 10, 1951
Dearheart—
It is 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 13)articulate it easily, but it combines must and dust and age, and walls of wood and floors of wood.
Toward the back of the shop at the left there’s a desk with a work-lamp on it, a man was sitting there, he was about fifty with a 14)Hogarth nose, he looked up and said “Good afternoon?” in a North Country accent and I said I just wanted to browse and he said please do.
The shelves go on forever. They go up to the ceiling and they’re very old and kind of grey, like old oak that has absorbed so much dust over the years they no longer are their true color. There’s a print section, or rather a long print table, with 15)Cruikshank and Rackham and Spy and all those old wonderful English 16)caricaturists and 17)illustrators that I’m not smart enough to know a lot about, and there are some lovely old, old illustrated magazines.
I stayed about half an hour hoping your Frank or one of the girls would turn up, but it was one-ish when I went in, I gather they were all out to lunch and I couldn’t stay any longer…
Love,
Maxine
April 11, 1969
Dear Katherine—
I take time out from housecleaning my bookshelves and sitting on the rug surrounded by books in every direction to 18)scrawl you a 19)Bon Voyage. I hope you and Brian have a ball in London. He said to me on the phone:
“Would you go with us if you had the fare?” and I nearly wept.
But I don’t know, maybe it’s just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years.
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 there.
The blessed man who sold me all my books died a few months ago. And Mr. Marks who owned the shop isdead. But Marks & Co.[注] is still there. If you happen to pass by 84, Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.
Helene
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