Status Updates From 84, Charing Cross Road (edi...

i do NOT intend to stop buying books, however, you have to have SOMEthing. …now listen, Frankie, it's going to be a long cold winter and I baby-sit in the evenings AND I NEED READING MATTER, NOW DON'T START SITTING AROUND, GO FIND ME SOME BOOKS.”

WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS' DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS?
…
i could just spit.
where is jan. 12, 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and round the bedroom with a red-hot poker?
…
i enclose two limp singles, i will make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. THEN i will rip up this ersatz book, page by page, AND WRAP THINGS IN IT.

A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to Englandwith preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what the go looking for. I told him I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he said:
"Then it's there."

Frank Doel, what are you DOING over there, you are not doing ANYthing, you are just sitting AROUND.
Where is Leigh Hunt? Where is the Oxford Verse? … I thought they'd be such nice uplifting reading for Lent and NOTHING do you send me.
you leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don't belong to me, some day they'll find out i did it and take my library card away.

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest.

… the Stevenson is so fine it embarrasses my orange-crate bookshelves…