The Lost Love of Books
Thomas C. Reeves, The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

The film 84 Charing Cross Road appeared in 1987. It starred Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, and Judi Dench and Maurice Denham had supporting roles. We saw this splendid film again the other evening and it recalled a world in which the love of books was held sacred in a way that would seem unimaginable today. Indeed, the movie couldn’t even be made in contemporary Hollywood or shown in any commercial theater. It is too tender, too subtle, and too thoughtful. The wonder is that it was made at all. Ironically, the financing came in large part from Bancroft’s husband, the wild and wacky comedian Mel Brooks.

This true story, published in book form in 1971 and later made into a play, is about a 37 year old spinster, Helen Hanff. She was a genial, eccentric Jewish lady who lived in a small apartment in a New York brownstone and did odd jobs and some writing to earn a meager living. She had only a year of college but read and adored great books. Sitting alone at home, smoking and drinking, she spent much of her life in the company of great minds. The history, the ideas, the stories, the language of people in other times fascinated her. And she was enthralled with the way books were designed and bound; she wanted old, unabridged, and rare volumes, even though she often was unable to afford such quality. If the copy she obtained was marked, she found it interesting to be guided by the hand of an unknown reader. Helen Hanff was not in the business of buying and reselling books. She was not even a collector. She wanted simply to absorb and cherish the finest books ever printed.

In 1949, she came across an ad for a London bookseller and responded with a request for several rare items. The head of the staff of five in the shop at 84 Charing Cross Road was Frank Doel, played in the movie by Anthony Hopkins. A correspondence of some two decades began. The letters were almost always about books but soon became personal. Doel was a highly literate, quiet, dutiful, family man. His fellow staff members were of various moods but all shared a love of the past and literature. Hanff began sending special foods to the bookstore staff, ordered from Denmark and shipped into an England still suffering wartime shortages. Doel and several on his staff wrote to Hanff, expressing their thanks, sharing personal information, and hoping one day to meet their benefactor and good customer. The New Yorker often longed to be in England, to be with her friends and to roam throughout the firm’s ample bookshelves.

Hanff was about to fly to London when dental bills made traveling impossible. So the letters between London and New York continued, and so did gifts, photographs, and books. It was only some 20 years later that Hanff made it to London, and by then Doel had died of a ruptured appendix and the shop had closed. Hanff consoled herself with the fact that she had at last made it to the place where she had been given genuine friendship and intellectual delight.

I have known and experienced such a love of books. As a graduate student and young professor I pored through catalogues, especially those from Britain and France, and spent more than I could afford on our small library. I occasionally had students who did the same. But as the decades passed, I saw this rather romantic world, which I associated with academia, erode and then virtually disappear. By the early 1970s, I viewed huge lines of students “getting rid of” assigned volumes, often before the final exams. I saw anti-intellectualism in the classroom reach an astonishing and disheartening level. I saw faculty members enamored far more with ideology and classroom popularity than with the tools of their disciplines. I watched campus libraries slash the purchase of scholarly journals and books, and saw bookstores become largely the dispensers of candy, gum, tee shirts, and tabloid magazines.

I watched sadly as the Wisconsin Historical Society popularized its fine journal. When I wrote a history of one of Wisconsin’s best modern governors, a member of one of the state’s wealthiest and most distinguished families, the Society was uninterested in publishing or even reviewing the book. When the book appeared last year, the state’s major newspapers chose not to review it. I didn’t take this personally. It’s the way things are.

So here’s a film about a strange world in which people used typewriters, had card catalogues, and searched for books by hand; a world in which books were cherished, at least by some, and bookstore employees were literate, knowledgeable, and interested in their work. It’s a gentle and unpretentious little movie about people who in their own small way were searching for and finding wisdom, beauty, and charity.

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