At the end of last week (just a few days ago now) something in my readings and research for my projects led me to pull out my first edition copy of Arthur Quiller-Couch: a biographical study of Q by F. Brittain (Cambridge at the University Press, 1947).
I have no memory of when and where I purchased this first edition copy… no memory of which second hand bookstore I found it in. Yet I do know I would not have been led to Q in the first place without Helene Hanff. My introduction to her was through the film version of her classic book, 84 Charing Cross Road.
As I pulled out the book, I had to move the three Hanff books lying on top of it. Then I found myself pulling them out of the shelf as well and these past few days I have been spending hours and hours dizzy with Hanff. Reading, reading, reading.
Hanff opened a new door to literature. I was already steeped in books but Helene has a way of writing that makes me tremble with love for the written word and for printed books. She became one of my guides as my personal library grew and grew (and grows).
My love for my personal library is limitless. I am constantly using it. It is a library after all… I love pulling out books for research, connections, just for reading for fun…
I love growing old with it.
From Q’s Legacy by Helene Hanff (Penguin Books, 1985), p. 176-177
And then I stood still, rooted – and stared. Not at the sign. At the rows of books that stretched along the back alcove wall. Except for the few the Queen’s bookbinder had restored, they were shabby, faded and discolored. Some had cracked spines, some had covers detached, eaten away by heat and dust. Almost all of them were in some way ravaged by years and use. Like their owner…
If I live to be very old, all my memories of the glory days will grow vague and confused, till I won’t be certain any of it really happened. But the books will be there, on my shelves and in my head – the one enduring reality I can be certain of till the day I die.
And my family have never complained (openly) about the constant heavy moving of books between homes! And I am grateful for that!
Tonight (March 23, 2026) my children and I will be going to the Vancouver Playhouse for a concert featuring their father’s favourite music – Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.
I tear up thinking back to Jamie (James Bowers 1950 – 2025) building me a beautiful built-in bookshelf large enough to hold my ever increasing library at our home in Roberts Creek in the late 90’s. Our marriage ended in that house but some things stayed eternal. The constancy of creating, learning, collecting, digesting, transforming. 4 of us creatives constantly creating. The kids were raised on the 84 Charing Cross Road, Jamie and I renting it on VHS often (and crying with each viewing), both of us quoting it endlessly.
From the film 84 Charing Cross Road (dir. David Jones, 1987):
You have to read Donne aloud.
It’s like a Bach fugue.
“All mankind is one volume.
When one man dies,
one chapter is not torn out of the book…
but translated into a better language.
And every chapter must be so translated.
God employs several translators.
Some pieces are translated by age,
some by sickness…
some by war…
some by justice.
But God’s hand shall bind up
all our scattered leaves again…
for that library…
where every book shall lie
open to one another.”
Dizzy with Donne.
I craved for more, but the closet was bare.
Check out Jamie’s second child’s moving and evocative new EP Through the Lonely Dale:
In making an EP about my dad, I accidentally made another one that is also about him. This is a collection of three tracks about my father, who passed last year. It is meant to be a supplemental release to an (as of this writing) upcoming release called “Of night and light and the half light,”
This is for Jamie Bowers. Thank you for listening. – Julian Bowers