ozzano

The present is an undeniably significant time in the realm of books. It’s a time when the nature and limits of books are being redefined so aggressively that to enclose the very term in scare quotes does not necessarily amount to a vagary in punctuation. The mostly static evolution of books is now approaching a flash point, that is, if it hasn’t yet been reached. The signs are as clear as Truman Capote’s favorite Russian vodka. Accompanied by the consistent rise in the sales of books in their various electronic iterations, Kindles, iPads, and Nooks are taking the place of the codex format in the hands of readers. Bookstores, if not downsizing their personnel or reducing their floor area, are shutting down their operations entirely. It’s a terribly different landscape from that of two, three, or four decades ago, when books were books (prefixes like “e-” or “enhanced” and suffixes like “pdf” and “epub” were not yet conceived and required as qualifiers), bookstores were brick-and-mortar establishments run by real people, and a certain book lover had to write to a bookseller thousands of miles away just to get the books that she wanted. The present is a setting into which the reappropriation of the essential elements of the story of “84, Charing Cross Road,” one of the most beloved books about books and people who love them, is virtually impossible. This nonfiction book, first published in 1970, is very much a product of its time. Formally it’s a collection of letters between a struggling freelance writer in New York City and a used bookstore employee in London. Letters! Do people even send those—old-fashioned snail mail—anymore? Surely e-mail, Twitter, or telepathic grunting hasn’t completely replaced it? LOL colon capital P. And a used bookstore? In this day and age, more and more readers are wont to ditch a visit to a nearby bookstore, used or not, knowing they could easily get a copy of a book they want with just a click of their computer mouses or a tap on their touchscreen devices. Helene Hanff, the person at the American side of the transatlantic correspondence that forms the spine of “84, Charing Cross Road,” had neither a computer mouse (unless it’s of the rodent sort, to which her modest apartment might have proved comfortable) nor a touchscreen device. What she had in the way of an input mechanism and a processor was her trusty typewriter, on which she wrote on the 5th of October 1959 a letter of inquiry to the staff of Marks & Co., a used bookstore located at 84, Charing Cross Road, London, England. “I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies,” she explained. “I enclose a list of my most pressing problems. If you have clean second-hand copies of any of the books on the list, for no more than $5.00 each, will you consider this a purchase order and send them to me?” Thus began the exceptional long-distance friendship between Hanff and Frank Doel, the chief agent of the bookstore who rigorously responded to her inquiries. Indeed, there were many more inquiries beyond Hanff’s initial wishlist, for books ranging from the popular to the obscure. Her incessant badgering about the books that Doel had so far failed to send coupled with his meek apologies for his apparent idleness is the source of most of this book’s lighthearted humor. It’s often entertaining to flip from a page containing Hanff’s jocular remarks into another with Doel’s shy reply. On one occasion she, having been hired as a scriptwriter for a murder mystery TV series where “all the suspects and corpses are cultured,” asked whether he would want to be “the murderer or the corpse” in an episode she’d like to do “about the rare book business in his honor.” A month and a half later he replied, “Your Ellery Queen scripts sound rather fun. I wish we could have the chance of seeing some of them on our TV over here—it wants livening up a bit (our TV I mean, not your script).” Whereas Hanff was of frank and lively disposition, Doel’s manner, as behooved his Britishness, was formal and precise, especially at first and sometimes to a fault. “I keep trying to puncture that proper British reserve,” Hanff wrote in a letter to one of Frank’s co-workers, “if he gets ulcers I did it.” That letter was one of the many others which were not addressed to Doel but were included in the collection as they greatly supplemented the two main correspondents’ bookish banter. Soon after the first few exchanges between Hanff and Doel, other employees of Marks & Co. and members of his family became pen pals with her and offered their thoughts on a variety of topics, including the British royalty, postwar deprivation, Yorkshire pudding, and, of course, Doel himself. Also included were several letters from Hanff’s friend, Maxine, who had the chance to visit the bookstore at 84, Charing Cross Road: “It is the loveliest old shop straight out of Dickens, you would go absolutely out of your mind over it.” To be sure, Hanff did go out of her mind in her reply to Maxine, where she expressed her deep longing to see and smell the shop herself. Redolent of obsolescence (or is that nostalgia?) from the standpoint of a twenty-first century citizen (or netizen, as it were), the correspondence between Hanff and the people of 84, Charing Cross Road, which lasted for an amazing two decades, is above all symptomatic of a condition that was in full sway then among the more dedicated of readers but is arguably less prevailing now in the digital era: bibliophilia. “I never knew a book could be such a joy to touch,” Hanff wrote a month after sending out her first letter, upon the arrival of a proper match for one of the items in her list. It’s titled “Virginibus Puerisque,” the first collection of essays by Robert Louis Stevenson, which, Hanff told Doel, was “so fine it embarrasses my orange-crate bookshelves, I’m almost afraid to handle such soft vellum and heavy cream-colored pages,” and was in stark contrast to “the dead-white paper and stiff cardboardy covers of American books.” Ah, the visual, tactile, and sometimes olfactory pleasures of book porn. Imagine a present-day Hanff experiencing a similar high from caressing and staring at her Kindle after successfully downloading the same Stevenson collection in e-book format from Project Gutenberg for much less than $5 (read: free). You can’t. You just can’t, for there are “book” lovers, and then there are book lovers. And Hanff, belonging to the latter sort, would sooner defenestrate the Kindle than read a “book” on it.

2023-01-09 09:42