Autumn's here—Happy New Year!
Not for me, that pallid substitute in January with its noisemakers and forgotten resolutions. My calendar resets annually with the opening of classroom doors, no
... [+]
Susan Lendroth has written children's picture books as well as essays and articles. She works for Los Angeles Public Library, a dream job for any booklover. "To An Unknown Booklover" is in Short Circuit #14, Short Édition's quarterly review.
I don't remember which I encountered first: Helene Hanff's book, 84 Charing Cross Road, or the Anne Bancroft / Anthony Hopkins movie of the same name. All I know is that decades later the title's blend of London, letters, and books still enchants me.
Published 50 years ago, 84 Charing Cross Road is a romance of the mail—a collection of letters between Helene, a feisty New York writer, and Frank Doel, the unfailingly polite manager of an antiquarian London bookshop. Individually, those letters speak of books and the correspondents' day-to-day lives. Collectively, they weave together a meeting place that exists out of time, a bygone era stitched between postboxes where deep friendships flourished through mail sent weeks or months apart.
Helene's irrepressible personality crackles off the page. In response to Frank's first letter addressed, "Dear Madam," Helene snaps back: "I hope ‘madam' doesn't mean over there what it does here."
Frank's British reserve melts over time, and Helene eventually exchanges gifts and recipes for Yorkshire pudding with a widening circle of correspondents among the staff, bonding over a collective foundation of books.
Every few years I dive again into Helene's and Frank's exchange, whispering yes when Helene says how much she enjoys traces left behind by the original owners of secondhand books. I, too, love catching glimpses of past lives: crumbled wildflowers pressed between pages, someone's 19th century inscription, a schoolboy's drawing penciled in the back of a battered primer.
Reading their conversation invites Helene, Frank, and the long-gone staff of the Marks & Co bookstore into my circle of friends. I imagine opening my mailbox to find such a letter—any letter—addressed to me. Their words enfold me in another world, the interchange fresh every time I read it.
Just as Helene's letters forge a link with London that Helene needs, her book links me to the land of Jane Austen, Hampton Court, and cream teas. Some financial crisis with dentistry or housing always quashes Helene's plans for travel to England; our recent pandemic postponed mine.
Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, writing 84 Charing Cross Road provided the means for Helene to finally visit. A modest success in America, the epistolary memoir proved more widely popular in the United Kingdom, and Helene traveled to London for its release.
I recently pulled my worn paperback copy of 84 Charing Cross Road from the shelf and found the text appeared much smaller than the last time I read it. I tried downloading the e-book version from the library but discovered they only offered a French translation. Maybe the time had come to purchase my own hardback edition.
Searching the internet turned up a number of used copies, including a few signed by the author herself. Having a copy signed by Helene appealed to me more than I expected. I had never before bought an autographed book except from authors at their readings, but somehow her personal signature enhanced the appeal of a book drawn from letters.
However, copies that passed through her hands did not come cheap, with most priced from $450 to $900, far beyond my budget. I was about to give up on owning one when I spotted an autographed UK first edition for $150 AUD at an Australian charity shop that supported a cat shelter. That caught my attention. I loved Helene, and I loved cats. Better still, the currency exchange rate favored my end of the purchase. Besides, who could resist the inscription pictured on the website, "To an unknown booklover, Helene Hanff."
I bought it quickly, entering my credit card details before I could talk myself out of spending more than I had ever paid for a book.
To celebrate, I downloaded the book's sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, an account of Helene's first trip to England. Exploring the sights in her company and meeting the quirky, endearing people that she encountered helped ease my own longing to return. I shopped with her in Harrod's massive department store and gazed up the lofty towers of Windsor Castle. Even getting lost in a nameless courtyard was a delight where the very walls breathed history.
Her British publisher, Andre Deutsch, arranged a hotel room for her down the street from their offices. In the final chapter, she mentions walking there on her last day in London to sign a few books before a car took her to the airport.
And there it was:
"[I] autographed twenty copies of the book for Australian booksellers due here tomorrow for a convention. Don't know their names and still couldn't bring myself just to write my name and let it go at that, it seems unfriendly. Wrote ‘To an unknown booklover' in every copy . . ."
I read that passage three times. Australia. A UK first edition. Helene's last day in London in 1971. My book. I was certain that I had just read a description of Helene signing MY book among that stack of 20 copies!
I imagined Andre Deutsch's staff handing an assortment of titles, including Helene's, to the Aussie booksellers and how some of them must have smiled reading her inscription. Each flew home with a suitcase full of books and decided whether to keep 84 Charing Cross Road as a memento or to sell it in their shop to a patron who collected autographed copies.
Whatever the book's journey through Australia, its travels had resumed, this time to the homeland of its author.
Life rarely grants perfect moments, but this has become one of mine. Helene reached across five decades and three continents to another of her unknown booklovers when she signed that copy of 84 Charing Cross Road half a century ago. And when a brown parcel from Victoria, Australia finally arrived on my doorstep, I held the whole, heady, splendid mix in my hands: letters, literature, London, and the kindred spirits of booklovers like me who love all three.