A professor of English literature, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst sets out in this books to share his love for reading and to gently nudge those of us who have either never experienced, or have forgotten, the act of slow and leisurely reading — the sort of reading that we probably did quite naturally when we were children...

This is a book about books, and about the best there is of this genre. It's a collection of letters written over a period of twenty years...a correspondence between a reader and a bookseller. The reader is Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and the bookseller is Frank Doel, who worked for Marks & Co, a second-hand bookshop located at 84 Charing Cross Road, London...

This is about books and reading, writing and language, and some of the eccentricities and foibles of passionate readers and collectors of books. There’s something about book love that makes us cast an indulgent eye on the kind of behaviour that people not afflicted by the passion would view as downright crazy, like the author’s description of a trip to a second-hand bookshop that her husband surprised her with, as a birthday gift. They spent seven hours in that shop and they came away with nineteen pounds worth of books