Word: hanff
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...this point, those well acquainted with quirk will have already recognized the fell shadow of another quirky epistolary work looming over Guernsey (don't make me type out the whole title again): Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, in which an American book lover from the pre-Amazon era forms a transatlantic friendship with an English bookseller. Hanff's book is a work of Good Quirk, the very best. But it has been done. And there is every indication that Guernsey will devolve from here into a rote exercise in Anglophilia and cozy, self-congratulatory bibliomania...
DIED. HELENE HANFF, 80, letter-loving U.S. author, whose wry and witty 20-year correspondence with a London bookseller delighted readers on both shores when she turned it into a book, 84, Charing Cross Road; in New York City. It became a play, then a film with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins...
...meet the widowed Hanff's closest friends, a wealthy young couple, a well-heeled actress daughter of a Park Avenue matron and a working-girl neighbor and her British boyfriend. They are a motley crew whose collective eccentricity is matched only by the writers own. All of these episodes--save one in which the actress, temporarily in London, scopes out the infamous bookstore for her pal back in the States--are irrelevant to the story's principal theme, bibliophilia, and remain half-baked...
Vignettes regarding the characters on the other side of the ocean are more effective as they concern the bookstore employees' reactions to Hanff's piquant letters. Each note is anticipated with great glee. The refreshing tone of sentences like "What kind of a Pepys diary is this? This is some editors idea of a Pepys diary" cuts through the tedium of life at 84 Charing Cross Road. With the letters eventually come packages of hard-to-find gourmet goodies from Denmark as a gesture of Hanff's appreciation for the employee's efforts on her part...
More gifts, snapshots, and letters from all members of the firm fly back and forth across the Atlantic as Hanfff is welcome into their spiritual family, "the England of English literature," as Hanff writes. A trip to 84 Charing Cross Road will make you want to join as well...