84 Charing Cross Road

This book is a real correspondence, beginning in 1949, between Helene Hanff, a New York writer hunting for out-of-print English literature, and Frank Doel of Marks & Co, an antiquarian bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road in London. Hanff sends want-lists and parcels of food during postwar shortages; Doel and his colleagues reply with invoices, finds, and increasingly personal notes. Over two decades the letters record books located and missed, staff marriages and deaths, and Hanff's unfulfilled plan to visit the shop. There is no invented plot: the interest lies in how a commercial exchange becomes a transatlantic friendship conducted entirely on paper.

Bound in tan cloth image blocked in silver and printed in black with a design. Silver endleaves. Black slipcase.