Charling Cross Road 84(11/01/1950)

Dear miss Hanff:

I am sorry for the delay in answering your lettle but i have been away out of town for a week or so and am now busy trying to catch up on your correspondence.

First of all, please don’t worry about us using old books such as Clarendon’s Rebellion for wrapping.In this particular case they were just two odd volumes with the covers detached and nobody in their right sense would have given us a shilling for them.

The Q anthology, The Pilgrim’s Way, has been sent to you by Book Post.The balance due was $1.85 so your $2 more than covered it. We haven’t  a copy of Pepys’ diary in stock at the moment but shall look out for one for you.

With best wishes,

Your faithfully,

F.Doel

Charling Cross Road 84(15/10/1050)

Well!!!

All I have to say to YOU,Frank Doel, is we live in depraved, destructive and degererate times when a booksjop- a BOOKSHOP- starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper.I said to John Henry when he stepped out of it:

“Would you belive a thing like that, Your Eminence?” andd he said he wouldn’t. You tore that book uo in the middle of a major battle and i don’t even know  which war it was.

The Newman arrived safely almost a week ago and i’m just beginning to recover.I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it.Not because it’s a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that  gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentlemen’s leather easy chair- not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-bedroom hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.

I want the Q anthology.i am not sure how much it was, I lost your last letter.i think it was about 2 bucks, i will enclose two singles, if I owe you more let me know.

Why don’t you wrap it in pages LCX2 and LCX3 so I can at least find out who won the battle and what war it was?

HH

Charling Cross Road 84(10/02/1950)

Dear helence,

i brought the enclosed snapshots to the shop with me weeks ago, we’ve been frightfully busy so have had no chance to send them on to you.They were taken in Norfolk where Doug is stationed with the RAF.None of them flatteringof me, but they are the best we have of the children and the one of Doug along is very good.

My dear, i do hope you get your wish to come to England.Why not save your pennies and come next summer? Mummy and Daddy have a house in Middlesex and would be delighted to put you up.

Megan Wells and i are going on a week’s holiday to Jersey in July.Why don’t you come with us and then you could economize the rest of month in the Middlesex?

Ben Marks is trying to see what I am writing so shall have to close.

sincerely,

Cecily

charling Cross Road 84(25/09/1950)

He has a first edition of Newman’s University for six bucks, do i want it, he asks innocently.

Dear frank:

Yes, I want it.i won’t be fir to live with myself.I ‘ve never cared about first editions per se, but a first edition of THAT book-!

oh my.

I can just see it.

Send the Oxford Verse, please. Never wonder if I’ve found something somewhere else,I don’t look anywhere else any more.Why should I run all the way down to 17th st. to buy dirty, badly made books when i can buy clean, beautiful ones from you without leaving the typewriter?From where i sit,London’s a lot closer that 17th street.

Enclosed please God please find $8. did i tell you about Brian’s lawsuit? he buys physics tomes from a technical bookshop in London, he’s not sloppy and haphazard like me, he brought an expensive set and went down to Rockefeller Plaza and stood in line and got a money order and cabled it or whatever you do with it, he’s a bussinessman, he does things right.

the money order got lost in transit.

Up his Majesty’s Postal service!

HH

 

Charling Cross Road 84(20/09/1950)

Dear Miss Hanff:

It is such a long time since we wrote to you I hope you do not think we have fogotten all about you wants.

Anyway, we now have in stock the Oxford book of English Verse, printed on india paper, original blue cloth binding,1905, inscription in ink on the flyleaf but a good secondhand copy,price $2.00. We thought we had better quote before sending, in case you have already purchased a copy.

some time ago you asked us for Newman’s Idea of a University.would you be interested in a copy of the first edition? we have just purchased one, particulars as follow:……

In case youn would like them, we will put both books on one side until you have time to reply.

with kind regards,

yours faithfully,

Frank Doel

 

Charling Cross Road 84(10/04/1950)

Dear Cecily:

And a vey bad cess to old Mr.Martin, tell him I’m so unstudious I never even went to college.I just happen to have peculiar taste in books, thanks to a  Cambridge professor named Quiller-Couch, know as Q,whom I felt over in a library when I was 17. and I am about as smart-looking as a Broadway panhandler.I live in moth-eaten sweaters and wood slacks, they don’t give us any heat here in the daytime.It’s a5 story brownstone and all the other tenants go out to work at 9:00am. and don’t come home till 6- and why shoulf the landlord heat the building for one small scrip-reader/writer working at home on the ground floor?

Poor frank,i give him such a hard time,I’m always bawing him out for something.I am only teasing, but I know he’ll take me seriously.I keep trying to puncture that proper British reserve, if he gets ulcers I did it.

Please write and tell me about London,i live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down wimpole Street  and stand in St.Paul’s where John Donne preached and sit on tthe step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and like that. a newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for.I told him I’d go looking for the England of English literature,and he said:

“then it’s there.”

Regards-

Helene Hanff

charling Cross Road 84(07/04/1949)

Dear Miss Hanff:

Please don’t let Frank know i am writing this but every time I send you a bill I’ve been dying to split in a little note and he might not think it quite proper of me. that sounds stuffy and he’s not, he’s quite nice really, very nice  in fact, it’s just that he does rather look on you as his private correspondent as all your lettles and parcels are addressed to him. But I just thought i would write to you on my own.

we all love your letters and try to imagine what you must look like.I ve decideed you’re young and very sophisticated and smart-looking.Old Mr.Martin thinks you must be quite studious-looking in spite of your wonderful sense of humor.Why don’t you send us a snapshot?We should love to have it.

If you are curious about Frank, he’s in his late thirties,quite nice looking,married to a very sweet Irish girl,I believe she’s his second wife.

Everyone was so grateful for the parcel.My little oneswere in Heaven-with the raisins and egg I was acturally able to make them a cake.

I do hope you don’t mind my writing.Please don’t mention it when you write to Frank.

with best wishes,

Cecily Farr

Charling Cross Road84(07/04/1950)

Dear Miss Hanff:

i have to thank you for the very welcome Easter parcel which arrived safely yesterday.We were all delighted to see the tins and the box of shell eggs, and the rest of the staff joints me thanking you for very kind and generous thought of us.

I am sorry we haven’t been able to send you any of the books you want.About the book of love poems, now and then we do get such a volume as you describe.We have none in stock at the moment but shall look out for one for you.

Again, many thanks for the parcel.

faithfully yours,

Frank Doel

for Mark& Co.

 

Charling Cross road 84(03/25/1950)

Frank Doel, what are you DOING over there, you are not doing ANYthing,you are just sitting AROUND.

Where is Leigh Hunt? Where is Oxford Verse? Where is  the Vulgate and dear goofy John Henry, I thought they’d be such nice uplifting reading for Rent and Noting do you send me.

You leave me sitting here writing long margin nites in library books that don’t belong to me, some day theyll be find out I did it and  take my library card away.

i have made arrangements with the Easter bunny to bring you an Egg, he will get over there and find you have died of Inertia.

i require a book of love poems with spring coming on.No Keats or shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbing-Wyattor Jonson or somebody, use your own judgment.Just a nice book preferably small enough to stick in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park.

well, don’t just sit there! Go find it! I swaer I don’t know how that shop keeps going.

Charling Cross Road 84(12/20/1949)

Dear miss Hanff:

Just a note to let you know that your gift parcel arrived safely and the contents have been shared out between the stuff. Mr.Marks and Mr.cohen insisted that we divide it up among ourselves and not include “the bosses”.I should just like to add that  everthing in the parcel was something that we either never see or can only be  had through the black market.It was extremly kind and generous of you to think of us in this way and we are all extremly grateful.

We all wish to express our thanks and send our greetings and best wishes for 1950.

yours faithfully,

Frank doel

For Marks& CO.