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IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not? I personally can’t think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.
    Trust you and Nora had a fine holiday. Mine was spent in Central Park, I had a month’s vacation from joey, my dear little dentist, he went on his honeymoon. i financed the honeymoon. Did I tell you he told me last spring I had to have all my teeth capped or all my teeth out? I decided to have them capped as I have got used to having teeth. But the cost is simply astronomical. So Elizabeth will have to ascend the throne without me, teeth are all I’m going to see crowned for the next couple of years.
    i do NOT intend to stop buying books, however, you have to have SOMEthing. Will you see if you can find me Shaw’s dramatic criticism please? And also his music criticism? I think there are several volumes, just send whatever you can find, 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.
    hh

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14 East 95th St.
New York City

December 12, 1952

    To “her friends at 84, Charing Cross Road”:
    The Book-Lovers’ Anthology stepped out of its wrappings, all gold-embossed leather and gold-tipped pages, easily the most beautiful book I own including the Newman first edition. It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I’ve never read before. Like Tristram Shandy’s description of his father’s remarkable library which “contained every book and treatise which had ever been wrote upon the subject of great noses.” (Frank! Go find me Tristram Shandy! )
    I do think it’s a very uneven exchange of Christmas presents. You’ll eat yours up in a week and have nothing left to show for it by New Year’s Day. I’ll have mine till the day I die—and die happy in the knowledge that I’m leaving it behind for someone else to love. I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some booklover yet unborn.
    Thank you all. Happy New Year.
    Helene

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37 Oakfield Court
Haslemere Road
Crouch End
London, N.8

17–12–52

    Dear Helene:
    So sorry I have been so long in dropping you a line. I hope you haven’t taken it too badly about Adlai. Maybe he will have better luck next time.
    Mrs. Boulton says she will gladly put you up next summer if she is still alive, she says, but I don’t know of anyone of her age who is more so, I feel sure she will live to be a hundred. Anyway, we can always fix you up somewhere.
    Thanks for the good things you sent us for Christmas, you are much too kind, Helene!—and if those bodies at Marks & Co. don’t give you a banquet when you come over next year, well, they deserve to be shot.
    I hope you have a lovely Christmas. Cheerio for now and all our best wishes and thanks.
    God bless!

Nora

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14 East 95th St.

May 3, 1953

    Frankie, you’ll DIE when I tell you—
    First, enclosed find $3, P-and-P arrived looking exactly as Jane ought to look, soft leather, slim and impeccable.
    Now then. Ellery went off the air and I was shuffling around piling up dentist bills and feeling pale when I was invited to write an outline for a TV show which dramatizes incidents from the lives of famous people. So I rushed home and did an outline of an incident from-the-life-of-a-famous-person and sent it in and they bought it and I wrote the script and they liked it and they’re gonna give me more work in the fall.
    And whaddaya think I dramatized? JOHN DONNE ELOPING WITH THE BOSS’S DAUGHTER out of Walton’s Lives. Nobody who watches television has the slightest idea who John Donne was, but thanks to Hemingway everybody knows No Man Is An Island, all I had to do was work that in and it was sold.
    So that’s how John Donne made the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” and paid for all