5. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

By Anne Brontë 

4. Grotesque

By Natsuo Kirino

 

3. 84, Charing Cross Road

By Helene Hanff

I do love second-hand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered “Comrade!” to whoever owned it before me. 

I wanted to start off with this lovely review that perfectly captured my feelings of 84, Charing Cross Road (though I dispute the "aging" bit as Hanff was only 33 when she began her correspondence with Frank Doel in 1949!):

Epistolary fiction had always captured my fancies, but I never knew non-fiction of a similar kind could possess far more power to entwine the reader in its vast web of human intricacies ranging from the art of letter-writing, to the art of conversation and how human compassion can traverse miles and miles of oceans to make a mark on people one has never met, seen, or even heard about. The potency of words is such that seemingly polarized people are woven together in a relationship that transcends the barriers of friendship and love and all other abstract notions mankind has come to acknowledge and define.

 

Such is the relationship between an aging scriptwriter hailing from New York, the vivacious Helene Hanff and a certain Frank Doel of Marks & Co., booksellers located in London at the eponymous 84, Charing Cross Road. Ms. Hanff has an unquenchable thirst for English literature and in search for now obscure classics does she begin her acerbic albeit sidesplitting correspondence with the booksellers situated miles away from her shabby apartment. Ms. Hanff stumbles upon the book dealers through an ad placement made in the Saturday Review of Literature. From here onwards starts a warm and compassionate relationship between her and Mr. Doel on whom the responsibility of delivering her books falls on. This relationship is penned down in form of letters spanning almost twenty years.

 

I loved loved LOVED this book!  It was SUCH A DELIGHT.  Charming, witty, cozy and yet brimming with intelligence and affection.  And this unlikely friendship between a brazen NYC writer and reserved English bookseller, which spanned decades and the vast expanse of the Atlantic ocean, was real. I think I read it within 24 hours as the breezy, epistolary format made it very easy. And I didn't want it to end. It had to though, as Frank Doel unexpectedly passed away from illness in 1968.  This was not a surprise for me as I had already the watched the film adaptation back in May 2024. 

Apparently, 84, Charing Cross Road was one of Anne Bancroft's faves and her husband Mel Brooks bought the rights to the book for her birthday, which was how we ended up with the wonderful film starring Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins (with a young Dame Judi Dench as Mrs Noel). I was so fond of the adaptation that I put the book on my list. When I'm not in a rush to read something, I prefer ordering secondhand books from the USA as there is much more range and choice. Sure enough, I found this paperback Penguin edition for only $4.75 USD ($5.23 total with tax!) in great condition.

 

I had ordered the book to be delivered to my MIL's address when we were there during Xmas but I left it somewhat late and the book arrived shortly AFTER we had already returned home. It languished at my mother in law's for several months. I never told anyone to look for it until my SIL found it, still in its unopened envelope, during a summer visit after the Patch-Addario family had left. Hubs was finally able to bring it back in September!  By then I had lost my momentum. Some more months passed before I finally remembered I wanted to read 84 Charing Cross Road, and here we are.

 

I learned later that Hanff was an Anglophile and autodidact. Unable to afford a college education during the Great Depression, she undertook a comprehensive, self-taught English literature course that lasted over a decade. She was then in her early thirties, scraping a living as a freelance scriptwriter and magazine journalist. Her unconventional education was structured around the writings of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q"), specifically his lectures at Cambridge University. Hanff discovered On the Art of Writing by "Q" in a library and used his recommendations as her syllabus, covering authors and texts he admired.  Under ‘Q’s gentle, ghostly tutelage’, the self-study process took approximately 11 years because she would stop her study to investigate unfamiliar references and texts, as the scholar had assumed the reader would be already familiar with these books.  

So I started reading Q. Who assumes I’ve read The Fairie Queene and Paradise Lost. So I read Paradise Lost and find I need to have read the New Testament. So I read the New Testament and find I need to read the Latin Vulgate. And my Latin reader says the rules governing the ablative are the same as in English. A-ha. Thanks a LOT!

Hanff didn't want to bother with the library because she wanted to have her reference books within easy grasp.  When she inquired at local booksellers, she discovered that the American editions of the English books she wanted were of lesser quality and/or over-priced. When Hanff spotted the Marks & Co ad, she wrote to them and the rest was history.  

Gentlemen: Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase ‘antiquarian book-sellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books . . .

It's a niche genre, I guess, but I love reading about under the radar autodidacts, like The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Another fact I learned was that Gene, Hanff's editor, was mentioned in her letters as being Chinese.  It was well-known that editor Genevieve Young was instrumental in getting 84, Charing Cross Road published. Young also had a fascinating legacy and bio of her own, entering the publishing business in the early 1950s, when there were few female editors and even fewer Asians.

It was bittersweet how Hanff finally made the journey to London well after Frank Doel had passed on and Marks & Co had long been shuttered. Even though Hanff made enough money to support herself relatively comfortably and was setting aside money for her trip, minor emergencies kept eating away at her savings. I think air travel was still prohibitively expensive for the average person during the 50s and 60s and ocean travel took longer.  Ironically, it wasn't until after 84, Charing Cross Road was published in 1970 that Hanff would afford to finally travel to London!  She wrote about her experience in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, which is now on my list.

 

There are so many wonderful online reviews of 84, Charing Cross Road.

From A Literary Love Affair:

By the time she wrote to Marks & Co., Hanff ’s pursuits had become, frankly, arcane. Her first few letters include requests for a very particular edition of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, de Tocqueville’s Journey to America and Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Four Socratic Dialogues.

But Helene Hanff is no dry old blue-stocking. She reads with the seasons, ordering ‘Dear goofy JH’s’ (John Henry Newman’s) The Idea of a University for Lent, and Pepys’s Diary for long winter evenings. On 25 March 1950, she writes to say that, with spring coming, she requires a book of love poems:

 No Keats or Shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbering . . . Just a nice book preferably small enough to stick in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park.

Had she ever been in love? Rumours after her death suggested that her heart had been broken by some high-ranking American whose identity she kept under wraps for the sake of his wife and family. Was she lonely? We cannot tell. All that is clear from her letters is that for this single woman in her ‘moth-eaten sweaters and slacks’ books are friends and companions, and antiquarian books especially so. She loves ‘inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins’; she rejoices in the way that the books sent by Marks & Co. ‘open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “hate to read new books”, and I hollered “Comrade!”’

In response to these wild, wise-cracking, passionate outpourings, ‘FPD’ of 84, Charing Cross Road is, at first, stiff: ‘Dear Madam’, his letters begin, and they are cautious almost to the point of curtness. Undaunted, Helene Hanff works at puncturing his reserve. ‘I hope “madam” doesn’t mean over there what it does here’, she writes, and on the rare occasions that she does not like the books he sends her, she makes no bones about it...

And that is how providence seems to operate, blocking the paths we think we want to take and then introducing unexpected openings in the form of opportunities and delights more wonderful than anything we could have dreamed up for ourselves. This was Helene Hanff ’s experience and, since meeting her through the pages of this book, it has been mine too. Nowadays if I find myself on Charing Cross Road it is with a sense of gratitude and wonder; and the knowledge that the best things come unbidden.

From A Life in Books:
 

The funny thing about Helene as an author is that she could not write fiction. She never made it as a playwright, though Lord knows she tried, and studied her art. She wrote scripts for TV shows, and reviewed books for film companies to advise on how well they might be adapted as films. The Lord of the Rings was one of her great ordeals, because she absolutely hated it, and charged her employers ten times her usual fee as recompense for the mental torture of trying to summarise the plot. (This explains clearly to me why she was not able to write fiction.)

I realized that there were many, many authors, and books, in the long history of English as a literature, that she just had to read. But the New York libraries couldn’t supply what she needed (she had a passion for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century essayists), and she began to order books from Marks & Co, who had advertised their services as an antiquarian book-finding service in the New York Times Saturday Review of Books.

If you like the sound of 84 Charing Cross Road, but want to find out more about her, try Underfoot in Show Business, and Q’s Legacy. There is also a what-I-did-in-London book, called The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, about when Helene finally gets to visit London, to see the BBC filming her book, and there’s also a book of New York reminiscences, Apple of My Eye. I’ve also found, to my great delight, that there’s a biography of Helene’s life, by Stephen Pastore, which I now have to read after a lifetime of vague guesses. 

 

2. The King in Yellow

By Robert W. Chambers

Saw this hardcover edition while browsing Walden Pond Books in   Oakland.  We (the Purves-Brebner clan) were in the area to pick up a Christmas tree at Brent's near the Grand Lake Theatre and had also consumed some delicious Asian-inspired pastries at Bake Sum.

So yes, I saw The King in Yellow and got Olman to pick it up for me as a Xmas present.  I also found a used copy of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, which happened to be on Olman's list.  Too bad for him though, finders keepers!
I first heard about The King in Yellow as a literary influence on True Detective S1, and it's been on my list ever since.  

Recently, I acquired a HP Lovecraft box set under purely consumeristic circumstances. I was taking advantage of Black Friday sales to do some early Xmas shopping and Indigo had a sale on Kpop albums, which is what my daughter is into collecting now.  Albums qualify for shipping, but I needed another $12 to reach the minimum amount for free shipping.  I saw that certain paperback box sets were half price so I got a HP Lovecraft box set for only $12.50 and as a minor horror buff, I've always been curious about his work.  Anyway, I was aware that author Robert Chambers was an early influence on Lovecraft, so I thought it was a nice coincidence when I saw this nice Pushkin Press edition from 2017 at Walden Books.

The King in Yellow was my first completed book in 2026 (not counting The Antifa Comic Book) and I was able to finish it within a few days.  It's really a collection of four short stories.  The original 1895 publication contained more stories but apparently it's just the first four that are thematically connected by a cursed play called 'The King in Yellow' which somehow ends up in the hands of various characters. When someone reads the second act, terrible things befall them, ie. they start losing touch with reality and become haunted by a ruined, mythical city called Carcosa, unwittingly serving a cult-like deity known only as Hastur, the Yellow King.  Apparently, the world of Carcosa was inspired by Ambrose Pierce. 

The first and probably best story was "The Repairer of Reputations".  The setting is a dystopic 1920s America that has become quite militaristic and Randian (before Ayn Rand and the military-industrial complex came about).  People of Jewish descent and other undesirable foreigners have been deported and a state has been established for African-Americans. The narrator, Hildred Castaigne, observes the official opening of a "Lethal Chambers" at a public park in Manhattan, for anyone who wants to painlessly end their life so as not be a burden on society.  We soon learn that our dear Hildred is not quite right in the head.  Not only had he suffered a head injury from a fall, he had also been committed for a period of time inside an asylum.  At some point he had also read "The King in Yellow" and often visits the creepy Repairer himself, a Yellow King devotee who happens to live above the store that's run by the father of his brother's fiancée.  I like the part when Hildred thought he was alone inside his shabby apartment admiring himself in mirror as he wore his golden crown but when his brother came upon him, he was really just wearing a cheap, dime-store trinket. The reader is basically plunged inside the unraveling mind of a man who's becoming more and more paranoid and deranged until he commits a terrible act.

As a Goodreads reviewer wrote: it is a bracing and imaginative bit of darkness on the page and, to me at least, quite wonderful. the style is so breezy, the pacing so brisk, the imagination so fertile and so oddly modern, the experience was pure pleasure. it is hard to believe that this story was written over a 100 years ago.

The next story, "The Mask", was ok and probably my least favourite as it was more melo-dramatic than creepy or chilling.  It takes place in Paris and involves a love triangle between young painter named Alec, a sculptor and would-be alchemist named Boris, and their love interest, Genevieve.  Boris has discovered or created a magical solution that can transform any organic object or living thing into lightly veined white marble.  It's unclear how the golden liquid came about, but it's strongly implied that it came from the same world that brought about "The King in Yellow".  Tragedy soon befalls the hapless trio. 

Next was "In the Court of the Dragon", also set in Paris, about a man pursued by a sinister church organist who is after his soul.  That pretty much sums up what is probably the shortest of the four stories and the least developed.

Last was "The Yellow Sign" and we're back in Manhattan (Greenwich Village) in "contemporary" times, ie. the 1890s. This time, an artist and his model are troubled by a sinister churchyard watchman who resembles a "plump white grave-worm".  Tessie keeps having the same recurring dream where she sees Scott lying inside a funeral casket being taken away by a horse-drawn carriage.  As their relationship develops, Tessie gives Scott "a clasp of black onyx, on which was inlaid a curious symbol or a letter in gold", which she happened to find one day near Battery Park.  Then soon after, Scott finds The King in Yellow in his collection, "a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase." It is, inexplicably, "The King in Yellow", a book he has studiously avoided: "If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages."

So we have come full circle, and our two young lovers are doomed towards a sad demise. This wiki site has a good plot summary.

The King in Yellow collection was an enjoyable read.  I did not expect it to be so readable.  TBH, I expected it to be less accessible and weirder, because after all, The King in Yellow is supposedly a classic example of weird fiction.  The stories were macabre in tone, full of creeping dread and gothic romanticism, with characters who are often artists or decadents, inhabitants of the demi-monde.  But the supernatural or occult references were very subtle and minimal.  This was not a bad thing, just not what I expected.  Still, very glad I read this.
 

1. The Antifa Comic Book (Revised & Expanded)

By Gord Hill

In mid-November, Olman and I visited the Expozine Fair. It used to be conveniently held in the Plateau inside a church basement but in recent years it's been taking place further north, like the Villeray area.  

This year's fair was really crowded - at least during that Saturday afternoon.  I was hoping to look at some D&Q publications but their tables were packed making it hard to stop and browse due to the steady motion of moving people.  There wasn't anything that stood out for me as I circumnavigated the crowded space.  

I finally found refuge at the Anarchist Bookshop section as they had arranged their tables into a C-shape, so that I could actually take my time in their little area, which was thankfully empty of people for some precious minutes.

This was how I came upon The Antifa Comic Book.  I didn't buy it right then and there though it was the only item I ended up purchasing at the fair.  The guy manning the table was friendly and handed me a flyer for a left wing book sale happening the following month near Metro Pie-IX. I didn't stay long at the Expozine fair as it was impossible to browse at your own pace without being jostled, or having to side-step someone, or wait your turn to do anything. I ended up leaving and met Olman near an Asian import shop in St-Hubert Plaza that was going out of business. We had tacos at a Mexican deli mart down the street.

The Antifa Comic Book was first published in 2018, and the copy I got was the 2025 revised and expanded edition containing new material that depicted events such as the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack, the 2022 convoy protests in Ottawa, even the 2017 mosque shooting in Quebec.  You could also tell which entries were new by how the graphics had been illustrated. The newer pages (like the one on the right) were drawn with thinner black lines and printed with less saturated colours compared to the older pages (like the one on the left). 

There was an odd entry that didn't seem to fit with the previous content in the Canadian section. It went from a brief history of fascist movements in Canada (from 1930-1990), the A.R.A Toronto (Anti-Racist Action), and then the following page portrayed the 2011 Norway Attacks -- when a far-right extremist set off a car bomb in Oslo, then traveled to a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utøya and went on a shooting spree killing dozens of people, mostly teenagers, simply for being "privileged" progressives.  Then the pages went back to the USA.  So the Norway section was an add-on and should've followed after Sweden.  Pragmatically, it was probably simpler to append the new pages rather than insert them between older sections, even though content-wise, it didn't make sense geographically.

In any case, I'm really glad I picked up The Antifa Comic Book.  Many reviewers, like this one, agreed how timely a book like this is during these turbulent times.  It was a fascinating read and very informative, covering key historical moments, like the birth of anti-fascist movements in Nazi Germany, continuing into the Spanish Civil War, even touching on the Second World War’s British Blackshirts and Anarchy in the U.K. and ending on Trump's presidency and Elon Musk taking over Twitter. It also gave an overview of the rise of nationalist right-wing groups on a global scale and how they use propaganda and technology to spread their ideas.

Even though I was already aware of how easily democratic freedoms and rights can be taken away, how important anti-fascist movements are and how history is always repeating itself, the book really helped give me a clearer overview by portraying key historical events and how it led to our somewhat frightening world situation today. 

Back in September, a certain so-called US president issued a statement defining “Antifa” (which hardly exists as a formal organization) as a domestic terrorist organization.  Hmm, I wonder why.  So much crazy shit has gone down since then, it's been overwhelming and fatiguing.  Minneapolis had been under seige by ICE since December and barely a week had passed in 2026 when a number of American citizens got shot and killed by ICE agents, most notably a mother.  And now so-called POTUS is obsessed with buying Greenland. Greenland! It just never ends, and there are no limits to what the wrong people in power can and will do.

Other things I learned from The Antifa Comic Book:

• It was Mussolini who granted state sovereignty to Vatican City. I had always assumed this as done centuries ago, but turns out this was done as recently as the mid-20th century.
• This I already knew, but the book confirmed that it's always the privileged and wealthy (monarchists, industrialists, aristocrats, high-ranking military and police officers, church officials, nationalists) who tend to fund and/or establish fascist movements.  Today, the list includes tech oligarchs and corporate billionaires, like Ronald Lauder (CEO of cosmetics giant Estée Lauder) who gave DT the idea of acquiring Greenland as he has vested interest in Arctic expansion and access to resources.
• I did find one small factual error. The July 24 mass stabbing in England that resulted in the deaths of three little girls did not happen at a school, but at a dance studio that was having a Taylor Swift theme day.  I could see how "school" was a quicker way to summarize the incident as it involved elementary school aged girls, but it wasn't accurate.

I'm certainly now interested in checking out The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill.  The question I have though is, can I be anti-capitalist and also still love shopping?