Windows To The World

Recently I finished reading 84, Charing Cross Road and Q's Legacy by Helene Hanff which I was drawn to after seeing the movie by the name of the first. I was very intrigued by the fact that the recovery after the war was so very slow in England since all our money was apparently sent on to Europe  in the recovery effort and eggs and meat were still a rarity and rationing went on almost ten years after the war ended.


Helene was a great reader who got her second hand books from England because the books were not the dead white paper cardboard stuff that she could find in the US, rather they were soft vellum and heavy cream colored pages. I can imagine them now. She was getting leather bound volumes often with gilt edged pages as well instead of school boy copies as she called them.


She read all kinds of things from poetry to the bible including the New Testaments although she was Jewish. The one thing she would not touch was fiction. She said she never could get interested in things that didn't happen to people who never lived.


On the other hand she made her living writing for television including Hallmark Hall of Fame and Ellery Queen. She also wrote history books for children.


In Q's Legacy she writes about having to drop out of school and having to educate herself. She decides to go through the alphabet of the best books that are written in a language that she can understand and really is dissatisfied until she reaches q.  With  On the Art of Writing by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch MA King Edward VII Professor of English Literature to the University of Cambridge she found what she was looking for.

Helene Hanff

Sometimes she would write for duplicates of books because people who had borrowed hers failed to return them. She asked why was it that people who would never think of stealing anything else would not think twice about stealing a book?