What Better Way to Celebrate a Love of Books?

Images from our smashing event last night, celebrating the 40th Anniversary of 84 Charing Cross Rd. Days before, Pam and Brad took some time for one last practice (pictured above). All their hard work paid off with a huge crowd and teary eyes by the end. The sweet friendship between Helene and Frank was brought to life and the wonder, nostalgia, and connection that books bring was indeed emphasized. What better way to celebrate a love of books?

If you missed the event, stay tuned here for a video recording. Or, grab the book and revel in Helene and Frank's letters on your own.


Anna, in Events

84 Charing Cross Road

Homer, our Book Machine, is participating in his first Reading Aloud event! The bookstore is celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the publication of Helene Hanff’s classic, 84 Charing Cross Road with a reading, April 28, at 7PM. Hanff’s little book is a selection of her correspondence with the good London booksellers at Marks & Co., the used bookstore from which she ordered all her books. Homer is reprinting a selection of the out-of-print titles Hanff bought used copies of. Here then the list so far:

• Two elegant, slim volumes of essays by Belloc, Hillaire: On Something and First and Last, both from The Echo Library.

• Joseph Addison’s famous essays from “The Spectator,” of a country gentleman, The Sir Roger De Coverley Papers
  

• As Helene found all those years ago, there is still no inexpensive edition Donne, John Sermons. So we’re reprinting his Devotions, with Two Sermons.

• Our Latin New Testament, or Novum Testamentum Latine, is edited by Everhard Nestle, and at $15.00 is considerably more inexpensive than any currently available in print.

• Dictionary of The Vulgate New Testament, at only $10.00!

• Our Hazlitt, William. Selected Essays, is not the Nonesuch Press edition, but is still a good selection, edited by Frank Cass, inexpensive, but still better and more complete than the in-print edition from Oxford, in which some modern editor has meddled and altered a number of the most famous essays in English. Also reprinted, Hazlitt’s Table Talk.

• Hunt, Leigh. Essays.
  

• Johnson, Samuel, On Shakespeare, 1908, Intro by Walter Raleigh – ours is exactly this edition!

• Prose, from poet and playwright, Jonson, Ben. Timber: Or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter, edited with an introduction and notes by Felix E. Schelling.
•  Lamb, Charles, Selected Essays of Charles Lamb

• Landor, Walter Savage, The Pentameron and Other Imaginary Conversations
  

• Newman, John Henry. Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education. Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin- "'Idea of a University"
  

• Quiller-Couch, Arthur, The Pilgrim's Way
  

• Stevenson, Robert Louis’s essays, Virginibus Puerisque (for boys and girls)

• Wyatt, Thomas. Poetical Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt with a Memoir and Critical Dissertation
  

• Walton, Izaak. The Lives of - John Donne - Sir Henry Wotton - Richard Hooker - George Herbert & Robert Sanderson

--Brad

Selections on Natural Selection

Beloved Helene Hanff, of 84 Charing Cross Road fame, when confronted by a book of excerpts from the sermons of John Donne, pleaded with her beloved bookstore to find her a complete edition of same. She knew her chances were slim. Having detailed her struggles to cobble together the full text on her own, she closed her letter with the following:

"i am going to bed. i will have hideous nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labelled Excerpt, Selection, Passage and Abridged."

I am, as always, with Helene. And yet...

There's a new anthology of Charles Darwin's work, called Evolutionary Writings, from Oxford University Press. Now I hate excerpts, selections, etc., as much or more than most, but this is a handsome hardcover and includes The Autobiographies, which one never sees in a hardcover of any kind. And there does seem to be quite a lot in this one fat volume.

I may have to have it. Still, by way of recommendation, I'm neither more nor less likely to recommend this book than I am the book Edward O. Wilson edited and introduce, From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, from Norton. In the case of the latter, besides Wilson, the book also boasts complete texts, BUT all bound together in one handsome but cumbersome brick. (Not that I didn't have to buy the book when it came out, but I've honestly never tried to read it after I read Wilson's introduction -- just too clumsily made to rest on the chest at night or carry on the bus.)

At least the new Oxford is reasonably sized for bus travel and late night reading in bed. But ultimately, one might simply be better off with individual and unexpurgated paperbacks, much as I hate to admit it.