5/21/2023 0 Comments Charing cross road 84….It’s dim inside, and you smell the shop before you see it it’s a lovely smell….it combines must and dust and age, and walls of wood and floors of wood…the shelves go on forever they go up to the ceiling….” Instead her best friend went and wrote back to her: “It is the loveliest old shop straight out of Dickens you would go absolutely out of your mind over it. The bookshop staff wanted her to visit, but Helene could not afford to go. Helene Hanff,who fell in love with an English bookshopīut she was a writer and writers are often poor. Through the mail, Helene Hanff wrote, “I enclose $4 to cover the $3.88 due you, buy yourself a cup of coffee with the 12 cents…Now, do you have….” And back came more estate-quality editions so beautiful she hardly dared read them. In England Lyons Tea Shops were all over, and Elizabeth would not ascend the throne for three more years. Yes, there really was a world when you could order anything and the seller did not doubt you would pay for it. The invoice would be enclosed with the books. saying they had copies of a few things on her list and would send them book mail. Back came a letter from one FPD (Frank Doel) for Marks & Co. She sent the bookshop a list of what she wanted. She wanted a number of classic books, then only available in old editions the great cheap reprints of today had not yet been envisioned. In New York 1949, in the years not long following the terrible losses in the world from the War, a young writer who had never gone to college sent a letter to a bookshop called Marks and Co.
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