84, Charing Cross Road is a 1970 book by Helene Hanff. It is an epistolary memoir composed of letters from the twenty-year correspondence between the author and Frank Doel, chief buyer for Marks & Co antiquarian booksellers, located at the eponymous address in London. It was later adapted into a 1975 television play, a 1976 radio drama, a 1981 stage play, and a 1987 film.
Background
Hanff was in search of obscure classics and British literature titles that she had been unable to find in New York City when she noticed an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature. She first contacted the shop in 1949 and it fell to Doel to fulfil her requests. In time, a long-distance friendship developed between the two and between Hanff and other staff members, as well, with an exchange of Christmas packages, birthday gifts and food parcels to help with the post-World War IIfood shortages in Britain. Their letters included discussions about topics as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, how to make Yorkshire Pudding, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the coronation of Elizabeth II. Hanff postponed visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed in December 1970. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.
The shop's site today
The five-story building where Marks & Co. was located during the events of the book still exists (51°30′49″N0°07′45″W / 51.51365°N 0.12916°W / 51.51365; -0.12916). A circular brass plaque on a pilaster on the street frontage acknowledges the story and marks the site. The premises were occupied by a music and CD shop in the early 1990s, and later other retail outlets. In 2009 they housed a Med Kitchen restaurant; and now form part of a McDonald's restaurant. In New York, the apartment house at 305 East 72nd Street, near Second Avenue, Hanff’s home from 1956 and from where she wrote her later letters, has been renamed “Charing Cross House” in her honor.[1]
Bibliography
Partial list of the books that Helene Hanff ordered from Marks & Co. and mentioned in 84, Charing Cross Road (alphabetical order):
Leonard, R. M. ed. The Book-Lover's Anthology, (1911)
Newman, John Henry. Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education. Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin – "The Idea of a University" (1852 and 1858)
Virginia Browns adapted the story for BBC Radio drama, and it was broadcast on Radio 3 on 15 January 1976, with Margaret Robertson as Hanff and Lyndon Brook as Doel. The play was produced by Christopher Venning.
The Chinese-Hong Kong film Book of Love or Finding Mr. Right 2 (Chinese: 北京遇上西雅圖之不二情書) (2016) references, and is loosely inspired by, 84, Charing Cross Road.
