Candi's Reviews > 84, Charing Cross Road

It’s about time I finally cracked this charming little book open. I’ve had it sitting on the nightstand for nearly a decade. A tribute to bookstores, booklovers, and England, this epistolary novel delivered exactly what I expected it to! If Goodreads hadn’t already confirmed what I suspected, namely that I’m not the only soul in the world with a book reading and book collecting obsession, then Helene Hanff’s experience would have offered the proof I needed. Her letters written from a small apartment in New York City to Frank, a used bookshop dealer in London, were a pleasure to read.

“’You and your Olde English books!’ You see how it is, Frankie, you’re the only soul alive who understands me.”

Likely, you won’t be surprised to learn that secondhand bookstores are one of my most treasured places on earth to visit. Immediately after checking into a hotel in whatever town or city I’ve landed, I will set the suitcase down, connect to the WiFi, and search the internet for restaurants and local used bookshops. I don’t usually show up with a plan in mind, but instead spend hours scouring the shelves for special finds. I love thinking about all the other readers that have previously held these books in their hands. Did they like the book but not well enough to keep it at home on that favorites shelf? Did he or she pass away years before and not have a book-loving friend or relative to hand the books down to? Or maybe this fellow bookworm simply ran out of space or packed up, moved, and decided to share a beloved book with some stranger in the future that will connect to him or her by some invisible thread.

“I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.”

I’m pleased to finally say I can move this book from the nightstand to the “keepers” shelf. I’m just a bit sorry that it ended all too soon. I could have kept reading about Helene and Frank for days yet. This little gem also serves as a reminder to not put off until tomorrow what you’d love to do today. Time is shorter than we imagine, and the people we wish to meet and the places we yearn to visit are waiting for us. The time is now!

“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 the 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 are looking for. I told him I’d go looking for the England of English literature, and he said ‘Then it’s there.’”