How to get an education...

WHAT KIND OF A BLACK PROTESTANT BIBLE IS THIS! Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose even written. Who ever taught Dr. Tindall the Vulgate Latin. They'll burn for it, mark my words. It's nothing to me, I'm Jewish myself, but I have a Catholic sister-in-law, a Methodist sister-in-law, a whole raft of Presbyterian cousins, through my late Uncle Abraham who was converted, and an aunt who's a Christian Science healer. And I'd like to think none of them would countenance an Anglican Latin Bible if they knew it existed. As it happens, they don't know Latin existed. ~Helene Hanff


If books delight the book lover the next best thing is talking books with someone who loves them as much as you do.  So I happen to owe a good bit of my education to a lady I never met, a lady who loved books even more than I do & who happened to have absolutely irreproachable taste.  She acquired all her reading material from a little bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road ~ & then she delighted the rest of us by sharing her correspondence with this bookshop over the course of 20 years.

If I had to choose just one word to describe Helene Hanff it would be irascible.  She was smart, sharp & witty ~ & she tolerated no fools.  She was also Jewish & American dealing with a very constrained British establishment & her pithy prose is an absolute delight to read. And unlike me she had a love for reality: Pepy's Diaries, Walton's Lives, Newman's University...

I know, the correspondence between an irate Jewish/American writer & a staid British bookseller sounds terribly dull ~ & no doubt it would be if written by anyone else.  Hanff is quirky.  She pays for her books by sending her money through 2 mail systems [without consulting exchange rates], much to Frank Doel's consternation & she is not above abusing the man.

March 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 the Oxford Verse?  Where is the Vulgate & dear goofy John Henry...?

I require a book of love poems with spring coming on.  No Keats or Shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbering....

Well, don't just sit there! Go find it! I swear I don't know how that shop keeps going.

For 20 years, through post war rationing when she sends food parcels over, to the psychedelic 60's, Helene bombards Marks & Co with requests for obscure & out of print reading material, always promising that One Day she will visit the London she has fallen in love with from afar. One day....

Ah, you will have to read her book to find out what happened. ☺