d music halls, and yet it is a
street without ostentation. No one in Charing Cross Road can be
assuming: no one could be other than genial and neighbourly. All good
books come there at last to find the people who will read them long
after they have been forgotten by the people who only talk about them.
Books endure while readers and talkers fade away, and Charing Cross
Road by its trade in books keeps alive the continuity of London's life
and deserves its fame. The books that reach this haven are for the
most part honest, and therefore many a weary soul turns out of the
streets where men and women swindle into this place where the thoughts
of honest men are piled on shelves, or put out in the open air in
boxes, marked twopence, fourpence, sixpence.... A real market this! A
fair without vanity. There are pictures to look at in the windows,
mementoes of dead artists and writers, and there is a constant stream
of people, the oddest mixture to be found anywhere on earth....
Everybody who has nothing very much to do goes to Charing Cross Road to
meet everybody who has dropped out of the main stream of humanity to
have a look at it as it goes by.

You can buy food in this delectable retreat--the best holiday ground in
England--and you can eat it in the ferocious book-shop kept by the
mildly-mannered man who called Clara's name blessed, and had her
photograph in his little dark room at the back of the shop.

Adnor Rodd always took his holidays in Charing Cross Road, for when he
went into the country he worked harder even than he did in London. He
wrote plays, and kept himself alive as best he could, because he hated
the theatre so much that he could never force himself through a stage
door. Silent, taciturn, he went on his way, caring for nothing but his
work, and sparing neither himself nor any one else in pursuing it.

He had started in London with money and friends, but work became such a
vice with him that he lost both, except just enough to keep him
alive--to go on working. Every now and then he was 'discovered' by a
playwright, a critic, or a literary man, but as he never returned a
compliment in his life 'discovery' never led very far.... A few people
knew that there was a strange man, called Rodd, who wrote masterpieces,
but simply would not or could not take advantage of the ordinary
commercial machinery to turn them into money or fame; but these few
raised their eyebrows or wagged their heads when he was