84, Charing Cross Road

By Helene Hanff

Book Overview

This wonderful show is a dramatization of business letters between a young struggling writer in New York and an antiquarian book store in London. In a sense, these are also love letters. They are about the love of good literature. The play takes place over a twenty year period, beginning in 1949 when Helene Hanff (played on Broadway by Ellen Burstyn) first writes Marks & Co. and ends in 1969 with the death of Frank Doel, the delightfully dusty supplier of so many old volumes to Helen who has shown her gratitude through the years by sending "care packages" to the staff of Marks & Co.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0573608490
• ISBN13: 9780573608490
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Concord Theatricals
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Better than reading someone's diary

Like many people, I saw a movie first. Naturally, due to media constraints, you expect a certain amount of the book to be homogenized. Therefore, I wanted to read what was missing. To my amazement, very little was missing or modified. I do not normally read this sort of book. Therefore, I was surprised to find myself wanting more when it finished. Besides, until I read the book, I did not realize that Charing Cross Road was a real place. The whole book is based on a collection of correspondence between Helene Hanff, an avid book reader, and Frank Doel, an agent for a British bookseller. My wife has taken this one step further and is collecting all the books that were mentioned in the correspondence. Some of these books appear to have been reprinted due to this publication. If you can find it, there is a book called "The Library of Helene Hanff." I wonder what became of all the other people described in the correspondents after the book.