The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff If I had not been a writer, theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen. Secondhand booksellers are the most friendly and most eccentric of all the characters I have known. Men are apt to prefer a prosperous error before an afflicted truth. Without it, they would never have come home in remarkable high spirits. It was singing that kept up their morale through boredom or hardship and that bound them together in friendship and discipline during the long war years. Their captain, a young musician fresh from music school, had enthusiastically taught his soldiers how to sing. These men had had no extra rations, but had practiced choral singing throughout the Burma campaign. Everyone asked if they had received extra rations, since they seemed so happy. When they disembarked at Yokosuka the people who came to greet them were astonished. They were always singing, even difficult pieces in several parts and they sang very well. And some of them were invalids, drained of color and borne on stretchers.īut among the returning soldiers there was one company of cheerful men.
Our Japanese soldiers who came back from overseas were a pitiful sight. Listen to The Literary Life: Commonplace Quotes: Angelina and Thomas talk about the characteristics of Helene as a reader and as a person seeking self-education.Ĭome back again next week for a special guest episode look at the literary life of Charlotte Mason! After that, we dig into George Eliot’s Silas Marner. Cindy talks about her deep identification with Helene the first time she read 84, Charing Cross Road and how much she dreamed of going to England. Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks share their first experiences reading this book of letters between Helene Hanff and Frank Doel. I owe it so much.Today’s book discussion on The Literary Life podcast centers around the book 84, Charing Cross Road. In the collection’s penultimate entry, Helene Hanff urges a tourist friend, ”If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me. No doubt their letters would have continued, but in 1969, a letter informed Helene that Frank Doel had died. For 20 years, this outspoken New York writer and Frank Doel, a rather more restrained London bookseller carry on an increasingly touching correspondence. So begins the delightfully reticent love affair between Miss Helene Hanff of New York and Messrs Marks and Co, sellers of rare and secondhand books, at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.’ The phrase ‘antiquarian book-sellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. ‘Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. INCLUDES AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE READERS
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