84 Charing
Cross Road is a 1970 book by Helene Hanff which was made
into a stage play, a television play and a film, about the
twenty-year correspondence and friendship between herself and
Frank Doel, chief buyer at Marks & C.O., antiquarian booksellers
located at the eponymous address in London, U.K.
Hanff, in
search of obscure classics and British literature titles that
she'd been unable to locate in the shops of Manhattan
noticed an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature and
first contacted the shop in 1949. It fell to Doel to
fulfill her requests. In time, a long-distance friendship
evolved, not only between the two, but including the other staff
members of Marks & Co. with an exchange of Christmas packages,
birthday gifts, and food parcels to compensate for post-World
War II food shortages in England. 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 Queen Elizabeth II.
Hanff postponed
visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in
December 1968 of peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the
bookshop eventually closed. Hanff did finally visit
Charing Cross Road and the empty but still standing shop in the
summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess
of Bloomsbury Street. A brass plaque on the building
that now stands on the shop's former site acknowledges the
story.
