Listen to the film again 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) is a real journey through time and an experience that touches those of us most sensitive to the “pre-digital” world. This era is not so far away and shows a relationship with the world that is so different from ours that it is surprising to see how far we have moved away from it.
I recall the story, based on a true story. The New York writer Helene Hanff (1916-1997) published in 1970 a non-fiction book that recounts her epistolary relationship with the employees of a small used bookstore, located in London, between 1949 and 1968.
Unable to find books by English authors from the Victorian and Elizabethan eras in the Big Apple, Helene (Anne Bancroft) personally orders several books from bookseller Frank Doel (Anthony Hopkins) to be mailed to her across the Atlantic. This will allow her to appreciate books of a quality that would put most of our current prints to shame.
You get it: it is an entry into the wonderful world of bibliophily and a true love letter to the relationship between a reader and a bookseller. We can see from then on how this profession can not only be highly personalized, noble, important, but above all “humanly” rich and rewarding, both for the professional and for his customers.
Report on time
84 Charing Cross Road recalls another relationship with time, when some people could (and still can) devote their lives to what we call “the bookish world”. This story expresses by the same fact, in a touching way, how this world is the vector of a culture that carries within it Humanism (in the deepest sense of the term), and that what is at stake there is not only literature and its existence, but human relations, because literature is nothing other than that.
But how did you get it? Did you go to your local bookseller to get some titles and allow him to practice the job he loves? Did you write to your favorite bookseller to order a book that you were planning to get and thus maintain the special bond that we have with our local merchants who keep small cultural businesses that are struggling to be profitable going?
But what you should ask yourself, whether you went to a bookstore or not, is what it did inside you. Didn’t you feel the privilege of discussing a subject that some people are passionate about? Didn’t you enjoy the dialogue, browsing the shelves, touching the back covers, meeting people who do the same as you? And then above all: when will you go back?
The day “August 12, I buy a Quebec book” is only a symbolic day which, like all symbols, is important because of what it represents and suggests. August 12 is a window that opens onto the profoundly human world of books.
And you who went to buy a book at your precious bookstore, you felt the gentle breeze that carries the healthy air of stories, tales, tales. And you saw that it is good there.
Surprisingly, I am sure you have perceived how it is a place where we never feel alone and where we truly meet the other, in this world of the book, which is the human world.