84, Charing Cross Road

One day in October 1949, Helene Hanff, a young, unknown writer, sent a letter from New York to Marks & Co., the bookstore at 84 Charing Cross Road in London. Passionate, obsessive, eccentric, and often penniless, Miss Hanff asked bookseller Frank Doel for rare and hard-to-find volumes that would quench her insatiable thirst for discovery. Twenty years later, they were still writing to each other, and their familiarity had blossomed into an almost loving intimacy. This eccentric and charming correspondence is a little gem that evokes, with infinite delicacy, the place that books—and bookstores—hold in our lives.