This is a special book.  I’ve read it perhaps 6-8 times. I buy a copy whenever I find it in a used bookstore and shamelessly press it upon friends urging them to read it.  I never tire of its simple story and a surprise ending that brings to mind Mrs. Ramsey’s death in “To the Lighthouse” conveyed by Virginia Woolf in a single sentence in the midst of an otherwise benign paragraph.

Hanff was a 33 year old playwright and script writer in 1949 living in a one room apartment in a shabby brownstone on 92nd Street in NYC when she noticed an advertisement in the Saturday Review of Literature for a London antiquarian bookseller.  She sent off a letter to Marks & Co. on October 5 addressed to “Gentlemen” with a list of books that she referred to as her ‘most pressing problems’.  Hanff, was a remarkably well-read, self-educated woman who had dropped out of Temple due to the need to support her parents.  Her taste ran to Greek and Latin authors as well as British 19th C writers, mostly esoteric.

Her initial letter resulted in a prompt response to “Dear Madam” with a book of Hazlitt’s essays and some selection of Stevenson (?RLS) and a note signed FPD, for Marks & Co. Over the next 20 years, Madam morphed into Helene and FPD became Frank Doel and then Frank.  Hanff not only became a regular customer of Marks & Co but a regular supplier of fresh and dried eggs, tins of ham and tongue, chocolates, and other nylons, all items not readily available in post WWII London.  For her generosity, she received thank you notes from the six employees of Marks & Co.  In one very funny letter, she realized with horror that she had sent tins of ham to Mr. Marks and Mr. Cohen, the owners of the bookstore, and asking if they kept kosher.

Over time, Hanff developed a correspondence not only with Frank Doel but with his wife Nora Doel and their daughter, Sheila.  This love story, love of books and love of people, ends sadly, but I won’t spoil it for you.  Hanff keeps intending to get to London but her modest means keep getting diverted to more practical matters such as fixing her teeth or buying furniture for a new apartment on 72nd, where today a plaque commemorates her living there. Likewise, a plaque marks the site of Marks & Co, where today’s London features a McDonalds. Ugh!

This slim volume is quite wonderful.  I urge you to buy it if you find it in your used bookstore browsings, and if not, I might have a copy or two I can send you.  I’ll always keep one so I can reread the book next year.