by Helene Hanff
With best wishes from us all,
Frank Doel
14 East 95th St.
New York City
March 3, 1952
Oh my, i do bless you for that Walton’s Lives. It’s incredible that a book published in 1840 can be in such perfect condition more than a hundred years later. Such beautiful, mellow roughcut pages they are, I do feel for poor William T. Gordon who wrote his name in it in 1841, what a crummy lot of descendants he must have—to sell it to you casually for nothing. Boy, I’d like to have run barefoot through THEIR library before they sold it.
fascinating book to read, did you know John Donne eloped with the boss’s highborn daughter and landed in the Tower for it and starved and starved and THEN got religion. my word.
Now listen, I’m enclosing a $5 bill, that Lives makes me very dissatisfied with my Angler which I bought before I met you. It’s one of those hard-faced American Classics-for-the-Masses editions, Izaak just hates it, he says he’s not going around looking like THAT for the rest of his life, so use the extra $2.50 for a nice English Angler, please.
you better watch out. i’m coming over there in 53 if ellery is renewed. i’m gonna climb up that victorian book-ladder and disturb the dust on the top shelves and everybody’s decorum. Or didn’t I ever tell you I write arty murders for Ellery Queen on television? All my scripts have artistic backgrounds—ballet, concert hall, opera—and all the suspects and corpses are cultured. Maybe I’ll do one about the rare book business in your honor, you want to be the murderer or the corpse?
hh
36 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8
March 24th, 1952
Dear Miss Hanff:
I hardly know how to express my thanks and feelings for the lovely box of everything to eat which you have sent me which arrived today. I have never been sent a parcel before. I really don’t think you should have done it. I can only say Thank you very much, I certainly will enjoy everything.
It was very kind of you to think of me in this way. I showed them all to Mrs. Doel, she thought they were lovely.
Again Thanking you very much, and best wishes.
Yours very sincerely,
Mary Boulton
Marks & Co., Booksellers
84, Charing Cross Road
London, W.C.2
17th April, 1952
Miss Helene Hanff
14 East 95th Street
New York 28, New York
U.S.A.
Dear Helene, (you see I don’t care about the files any more),
You will be pleased to know we have just purchased a private library which includes a very nice copy of Walton’s Compleat Angler and hope to have it to send you next week, price approximately $2.25 and your credit balance with us is more than enough to cover it.
Your Ellery Queen scripts sound rather fun. I wish we could have the chance of seeing some of them on our TV over here—it wants livening up a bit (our TV I mean, not your script).
Nora and all here join me in sending our best wishes,
Yours faithfully,
Frank Doel
37 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8
Sunday, May 4th, 1952
Dear Helene,
Thanks for the parcel of dried egg received on Friday and I was very glad for same, I did mention something about eggs coming off the ration, well it just hasn’t happened so the powder was a godsend for our weekend cakes, etc. Frank is taking some to the shop to send to Cecily, as he keeps forgetting to bring home her address. I expect you know she has left the shop and is waiting to join her husband in the East.
I am enclosing a few snaps, Frank says none of them do him justice, he is much better-looking; but we just let him dream.
Sheila was home for a month’s break and we have been gadding about a bit to the seaside for day trips and sight-seeing and must now pull in our horns a bit, as the cost of transport here is terrific. It is our ambition to have a car but they are so expensive and a decent secondhand one is dearer than a new one. The new ones are being exported and there are so few for the home market some of my friends have been waiting 5 to 7 years for a new car.
Sheila is going to say a “jolly good prayer” for you so you may get your wish to come to England because the tin of bacon we had from you on Easter Monday was such a treat. So if “jolly good prayers” are answered you might have a windfall and be able to come and see us soon.
Well, so long for now and thanks once again.
Nora
14 East 95th St.
New York City
May 11, 1952
Dear Frank:
Meant to write you the day the Angler arrived, just to thank you, the woodcuts alone are worth ten times the price of the book. What a weird world we live in when so beautiful a thing can be owned for life—for the price of a ticket to a Broadway movie palace, or 1/50th the cost of having one tooth capped.
Well, if your books cost what they’re worth I couldn’t afford them!
You’ll be fascinated to learn (from me that hates novels) that I finally got round to Jane Austen and went out of my mind over Pride & Prejudice which I can’t bring myself to take back to the library till you find me a copy of my own.
Regards to Nora and the wage-slaves.
HH
37 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8
24–8–52
Dear Helene:
Here I am again to thank you most gratefully for our share in the wonderful parcels you so kindly sent to Marks & Co. I wish I could send you something in return.
By the way, Helene, this week we have become the proud possessors of a car, not a new one, mind you, but it goes and that’s what matters isn’t it? Now maybe you will tell us you’re paying us a call?
Mrs. Boulton put up two cousins of mine who came down from Scotland for a couple of weeks and they were very comfortable. She bedded them and I fed them. Now if by any chance you can manage the fare to England next year for the Coronation, Mrs. Boulton will see that you have a bed.
Well, I’ll say so long for now and send you our best wishes and thanks once again for the meat and eggs.
Yours sincerely,
Nora
Marks & Co., Booksellers
84, Charing Cross Road
London, W.C.2
26th August, 1952
Miss Helene Hanff
14 East 95th Street
New York 28, New York
U.S.A.
Dear Helene,
I am writing once again to thank you on behalf of all here for your three very exciting parcels which arrived a few days ago. It is really too good of you to spend your hard-earned cash on us in this way and I can assure you that we do appreciate your kind thoughts of us.
We had about thirty volumes of Loeb Classics come in a few days ago but alas, no Horace, Sappho or Catullus.
I am taking a couple of weeks’ holiday commencing September 1, but as I have just bought a car we are completely “broke” so will have to take things easily. Nora has a sister who lives by the sea so we are hoping she will take pity on us and invite us to stay with her. It is my first car so we are all very thrilled with it—even though it is an old 1939 model. So long as it gets us to places without breaking down too often we shall be quite happy.
With all good wishes,
Frank Doel
In August 1952, Frank bought this 1939
Morris 12, then a major purchase.
14 East 95th St.
New York City
September 18, 1952
Frankie, guess who came while you were away on vacation? SAM PEPYS! Please thank whoever mailed him for me, he came a week ago, stepped out of four pages of some tabloid, three honest navy-blue volumes of him; I read the tabloid over lunch and started Sam after dinner.
&
nbsp; He says to tell you he’s overJOYED to be here, he was previously owned by a slob who never even bothered to cut the pages. I’m wrecking them, it’s the thinnest India paper I ever saw. We call it “onion skin” over here and it’s a good name for it. But heavier paper would have taken up six or seven volumes so I’m grateful for the India. I only have three bookshelves and very few books left to throw out.
I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I’m never going to read again like I throw out clothes I’m never going to wear again. It shocks everybody. My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the best sellers, they get through them as fast as possible, I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don’t remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON’T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not? I personally can’t think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.
Trust you and Nora had a fine holiday. Mine was spent in Central Park, I had a month’s vacation from joey, my dear little dentist, he went on his honeymoon. i financed the honeymoon. Did I tell you he told me last spring I had to have all my teeth capped or all my teeth out? I decided to have them capped as I have got used to having teeth. But the cost is simply astronomical. So Elizabeth will have to ascend the throne without me, teeth are all I’m going to see crowned for the next couple of years.
i do NOT intend to stop buying books, however, you have to have SOMEthing. Will you see if you can find me Shaw’s dramatic criticism please? And also his music criticism? I think there are several volumes, just send whatever you can find, now listen, Frankie, it’s going to be a long cold winter and I baby-sit in the evenings AND I NEED READING MATTER, NOW DON’T START SITTING AROUND, GO FIND ME SOME BOOKS.
hh
14 East 95th St.
New York City
December 12, 1952
To “her friends at 84, Charing Cross Road”:
The Book-Lovers’ Anthology stepped out of its wrappings, all gold-embossed leather and gold-tipped pages, easily the most beautiful book I own including the Newman first edition. It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I’ve never read before. Like Tristram Shandy’s description of his father’s remarkable library which “contained every book and treatise which had ever been wrote upon the subject of great noses.” (Frank! Go find me Tristram Shandy!)
I do think it’s a very uneven exchange of Christmas presents. You’ll eat yours up in a week and have nothing left to show for it by New Year’s Day. I’ll have mine till the day I die—and die happy in the knowledge that I’m leaving it behind for someone else to love. I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some booklover yet unborn.
Thank you all. Happy New Year.
Helene
37 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8
17–12–52
Dear Helene:
So sorry I have been so long in dropping you a line. I hope you haven’t taken it too badly about Adlai. Maybe he will have better luck next time.
Mrs. Boulton says she will gladly put you up next summer if she is still alive, she says, but I don’t know of anyone of her age who is more so, I feel sure she will live to be a hundred. Anyway, we can always fix you up somewhere.
Thanks for the good things you sent us for Christmas, you are much too kind, Helene!—and if those bodies at Marks & Co. don’t give you a banquet when you come over next year, well, they deserve to be shot.
I hope you have a lovely Christmas. Cheerio for now and all our best wishes and thanks.
God bless!
Nora
14 East 95th St.
May 3, 1953
Frankie, you’ll DIE when I tell you—
First, enclosed find $3, P-and-P arrived looking exactly as Jane ought to look, soft leather, slim and impeccable.
Now then. Ellery went off the air and I was shuffling around piling up dentist bills and feeling pale when I was invited to write an outline for a TV show which dramatizes incidents from the lives of famous people. So I rushed home and did an outline of an incident from-the-life-of-a-famous-person and sent it in and they bought it and I wrote the script and they liked it and they’re gonna give me more work in the fall.
And whaddaya think I dramatized? JOHN DONNE ELOPING WITH THE BOSS’S DAUGHTER out of Walton’s Lives. Nobody who watches television has the slightest idea who John Donne was, but thanks to Hemingway everybody knows No Man Is An Island, all I had to do was work that in and it was sold.
So that’s how John Donne made the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” and paid for all the books you ever sent me and five teeth.
I plan to crawl out of bed before dawn on Coronation Day to attend the ceremony by radio. Will be thinking of you all.
cheers
hh
Marks & Co., Booksellers
84, Charing Cross Road
London, W.C.2
11th June, 1953
Miss Helene Hanff
14 East 95th Street
New York 28, New York
U.S.A.
Dear Helene,
Just a note to let you know that your parcel arrived safely on June 1, just in time for our Coronation Day celebrations. We had a number of friends at home to watch TV on the day, and so the ham was most welcome to provide them with something to eat. It was delicious, and we all drank your health as well as the Queen’s.
It was most kind of you to spend your hard-earned money on us like this, and the rest of the staff join me in saying thanks a lot.
With very best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Frank Doel
Boldmere Road
Eastcote
Pinner
Middlesex
23–9–53
Helene dear,
Am dashing this off to say you must send nothing at all to the shop for Christmas, everything is now off rations and even nylons are available in all the better shops. Please save your money as the most important thing after your dentist is your trip to England. Only don’t come in ’54 as I shall be out of the country, come in ’55 when we shall be back and you can stay with us.
Doug writes that our “call” may come at any moment as we are next in line for married quarters. The children and I are hoping to join him before Christmas. He is well and happy on Bahrein Island in the middle of the Persian Gulf (if you’ve got an atlas) but will return to the RAF base at Habbaniya in Iraq when our quarters are available and we will join him there, all being well.
Write again soon. Even if I do “pop off” Mother will forward your letter.
Love and best wishes—
Cecily
14 East 95th St.
September 2, 1955
DO YOU MEAN TO SIT THERE AND TELL ME YOU’VE BEEN PUBLISHING THESE MAMMOTH CATALOGUES ALL THESE YEARS AND THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU EVER BOTHERED TO SEND ME ONE! THOU VARLET?
Don’t remember which restoration playwright called everybody a Varlet, I always wanted to use it in a sentence.
As it happens, the only thing which MIGHT interest me is the CatulIus, it’s not the Loeb Classics but it sounds like it’ll do. If you still have it, mail it and I’ll send you the –/6s 2d as soon as you translate it, Kay and Brian moved to the suburbs and left me without a translator.
I shall be obliged if you will send Nora and the girls to church every Sunday for the next month to pray for the continued health and strength of the messrs. gilliam, reese, snider, campanella, robinson, hodges, furillo, podres, newcombe and labine, collectively known as The Brooklyn Dodgers. If they lose this World Series I shall D
o Myself In and then where will you be?
Have you got De Tocqueville’s Journey to America? Somebody borrowed mine and never gave it back. Why is it that people who wouldn’t dream of stealing anything else think it’s perfectly all right to steal books?
Regards to Megan if she’s still there. And what’s become of Cecily, is she back from Iraq?
h.h.
Marks & Co., Booksellers
84, Charing Cross Road
London, W.C.2
13th December, 1955
Miss Helene Hanff
14 East 95th Street
New York 28, N.Y.
U.S.A.
Dear Helene,
I feel very guilty about not writing to you before this, but you can put it down to a dose of ’flu which kept me away from the shop for a couple of weeks and a sudden rush of work since I came back.
About the Catullus in our catalogue. This was already sold before we received your letter but I have sent you an edition which contains the Latin text with a verse translation by Sir Richard Burton and also a prose translation by Leonard Smithers, printed in large type, and all for $3.78. The binding is not very handsome but it’s a good clean copy. We have no edition of De Tocqueville but will keep looking for one for you.
