84 Charing Cross Road (1987)

Anne Bancroft: Helene Hanff

Photos 

Quotes 

• Helene Hanff : [reading from John Donne's "Meditations"]  "All mankind is... one volume; when one man dies, one Chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand... shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that Library where every book shall lie open to one another."

• [first lines] 

  Businessman on plane : Your first trip to London?

  Helene Hanff : Yes.

  Businessman on plane : You want a word of advice? Don't trust the cab drivers; they'll take you five miles to go three blocks... and, uh, don't waste your time looking at a street map. Nobody can find their way around London - not even Londoners.

  Helene Hanff : Maybe I should go to Baltimore instead.

  Businessman on plane : No; you'll enjoy it. London's a great place. What kind of trip is it - business or pleasure?

  Helene Hanff : Unfinished business.

• Helene Hanff : I love inscriptions on flyleafs and notes in margins. I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned and reading passages someone long-gone has called my attention to.

• Helene Hanff : Being used to the dead white paper and the stiff cardboardy covers of American books, I never knew a book could be such a joy to the touch.

• Helene Hanff : [written in a letter to Frank]  "I can never get interested in things that didn't happen to people who never lived."

• Helene Hanff : [typing]  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 : I'm a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books.

• [last lines] 

  Helene Hanff : Here I am, Frankie; I finally made it.

• Helene Hanff : Doesn't anyone read English literature in New York?

• Helene Hanff : I love used books that open to the page a previous owner read oftenest. When Hazlitt came, he opened to, "I hate to read new books." And I hollered, "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.

• Helene Hanff : [In cinema, watching "Brief Encounter", thinking to herself]  Please write and tell me about London. I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel it's 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 places like that. A newspaper man I know who was stationed in London during the war says that 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 that it's there.

• Helene Hanff : Dizzy with Donne. I craved for more, but the closet was bare.

• Helene Hanff : You know, Frankie, you're the only soul alive who understands me!

• Helene Hanff : All right, that's enough Chaucer-made-easy. It has the school room smell of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. I'm glad I read it. I liked reading about the nun who ate so dainty with her fingers she never dripped any grease on herself. I've never been able to make that claim. Wasn't anything else intrigued me much, it's just stories. Now, if Chaucer had kept a diary and told me what it was like to be a clerk in the palace of Richard lll, *that* I'd learn Old English for.

• Helene Hanff : I hope "madam" doesn't mean over there what it means over here.

• Helene Hanff : Oh, my God! Look at this. They've got spiced lard, liver paste, meatballs, chocolate shortcake, margarine, eggs, cheese! Well, they've got everything.

• Helene Hanff : "The reader will not credit that such things could be," Walton says somewhere or other, "but I was there and I saw it." That's for me! I'm a great lover of "I was there" books.

• Taxi Driver : Where to luv?

  Helene Hanff : 84 Charing Cross Road.

• Helene Hanff : If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road... kiss it for me!

• Helene Hanff : Yorkshire pudding out of this world. We have nothing like it. I described it to someone as a high, curved, smooth, empty waffle.

• Helene Hanff : I just saw your mother. She says you don't think the show will run a month and she says you took two dozen pairs of nylons over there. So, do me a favor. As soon as the closing notice goes up, take three pairs of nylons around to the bookshop for me, give them to Frank Doel. Tell him they're for the two girls and Nora, his wife. Your mother says I am not to enclose any money for them, she got them last summer at a close-out sale at Saks. They were very cheap and she'll donate them to the shop. She's feeling pro-British.

• Helene Hanff : I shall be obliged if you will send Nora and the girls to church for the next month - to pray for the continued health and strength of the Misters Gilliam, Reese, Snider, Campanella, Robinson, Hodges, Furillo, Podres, Newcombe and Labine - collectively known as the Brooklyn Dodgers.

• Helene Hanff : Somebody gave me this book for Christmas. It's "A Great Modern Library" book. Ever seen one of those? It's less attractively bound than the "Proceedings of the New York State Assembly" and it weighs more. It was a given to me by a gent who knows I'm fond of John Donne. The title of this book is: "The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne *and* the Complete Poetry of William Blake"? The question mark is mine. Will you please tell me what those two boys have in common except - they were both English and they both wrote.