84, Charing Cross Road

This is a record of a love-affair between a lady and a shop. They never met, but it lasted for twenty years and brought out the best of them both for all that time.

The shop was Marks & Co, a London bookseller dealing in rare and secondhand books. The lady was a merry New Yorker who didn't believe in being impersonal. Instead of writing orders for books, she wrote letters, first to Frank Doel, the manager, then to members of his staff and his family as well; and because when the correspondence started on October 5, 1949, Britain was still enduring rationing, she sent delicious parcels of tongue, eggs, biscuits and so on. Very British and correct to start with, Frank Doel and his staff soon responded with astonished pleasure, and the resulting relationship was a delight to both sides.

The correspondence ended only with Frank Doel's death, which was followed by the closing of Marks & Co. It is preserved in this book, which has made it famous: so famous that in 1981 it was shaped into a play by James Roose-Evans, to the great joy of audiences in London's West End and on New York's Broadway.

When she was a girl Helene Hanff wanted to be a playwright herself and studied at the Theatre Guild after winning an award. She has told the comic story of this ambition in her witty book Under-foot in Show Business. Later she became a script-writer for television. She has also written an enchanting introduction to New York called The Apple of My Eye, and an account of her first visit to England, which took place after the publication of 84, Charing Cross Road, to which she gave the proud title The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.