84, Charing Cross Road

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

Have you got De Tocqueville's Journey to America? Somebody borrowed mine and never gave it back. Why is it that who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?

It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on.

«The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON’T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT!»

Why should I run all the way down to 17th St. to buy dirty, badly made books when I can buy clean, beautiful ones from you without leaving the typewriter? From where I sit, London's a lot closer than 17th Street.

'The reader will not credit that such things could be,' Walton says somewhere or other, 'but I was there and I saw it.'
That's for me, I'm a great lover of I-was-there books.

I 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 book-lover yet unborn.

I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the book-seller coming out in you all, you were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.)

I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it's a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman's leather easy chair - not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.