The 35 books mentioned by Helene Hanff at 84, Charing Cross Road Take a good look at the two photos, and see how the tree on the door has grown I don't know if this was really necessary for the article. Something that today with the abandonment of emails and the digital age I doubt will be repeated.

Curiosity and new technologies have led me to visit with Street View of Google Maps and see how it is now, and what I have found has broken all the romanticism that old written faces had created between a reader in New York and a bookstore in London. bookstore located as you can imagine at 84, Charing Cross Road. The image with which the article begins corresponds to the Marks & Co. But Miss Fiske is gone now, and I found it pretty slow-going on my own.There is even a play that is a real hit. Sitting next to her, I suspect, I would have loved it, too. She never had to talk to me about the love of books because she simply exuded it and I absorbed it. Miss Fiske ran the book club and the Saturday morning puppet shows and the book fairs and the story readings. She instilled such a love of books in me that I still search used bookstore for the adventures of the Melody Family, by Elizabeth Enright those were the first 'real books' I read. Miss Fiske, who you may remember from the first paragraph of this review, was the librarian at the Urbana Free Library when I was growing up. After many years, Hopkins dies and then Bancroft finally goes to London and visits the now-empty bookstore. Hopkins occupies a silent marriage in a London bedroom suburb.

Bancroft leads a lonely life in a New York apartment. Hopkins sends precious editions of Boswell, Chesterton and Cardinal Newman ('Dear John Henry,' Bancroft calls him). What can he look forward to next: autoeroticism? Bancroft sends care packages of ham to postwar England. Now he has a love story in which the lovers do not meet. His previous film was Harold Pinter's ' Betrayal,' which was a love story told backward, beginning with the unhappy conclusion and ending with the lovers' first kiss.

The director, David Jones, does what he can. Most of the action takes place in the post office. There is not a lot of drama in this story. She begins a correspondence with the bookseller ( Anthony Hopkins), and thus commences a relationship that lasts for years without the two people ever meeting each other.

She sends them her want list and is soon delighted to receive a package of used books - good readable editions, cheap. The story begins in the years right after World War II, when London was still gripped by food rationing and pocked by bomb craters.Ī New York woman ( Anne Bancroft), who loves books but cannot afford expensive ones, sees an ad in the Saturday Review for a London bookstore.

84 charing