In the collection’s penultimate entry, Helene Hanff urges a tourist friend, ”If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me. No doubt their letters would have continued, but in 1969, a letter informed Helene that Frank Doel had died. For 20 years, this outspoken New York writer and Frank Doel, a rather more restrained London bookseller carry on an increasingly touching correspondence. In that, the difference between the plain-speaking, relaxed New Yorker, and the buttoned-down London bookseller is a. Film about two friends (Anthony Hopkins & Anne Bancroft) who had never met, based on Helene Hanffs book. Logically, they make a good pairing, but 84 is by far the more enjoyable experience. So begins the delightfully reticent love affair between Miss Helene Hanff of New York and Messrs Marks and Co, sellers of rare and secondhand books, at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. The journal of her visit, entitled The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, is usually packaged with 84 Charing Cross Road in reprints of recent years. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.’ The phrase ‘antiquarian book-sellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. Based on the memoirs of Helene Hanff (the book contains the letters from which they read throughout the film), this is the story of a single New York woman named Helene Hanff (Anne Bancroft) who builds a forty-year friendship with some people who work in a bookstore in England. ‘Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. 84 Charing Cross Road is one of my favorite movies. INCLUDES AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE READERS
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