Four Cross Roads

I ran across this story a few days ago, and I thought I’d share: in 1973 Anthony Hopkins was preparing to film the movie The Girl from Petrovka about a Russian ballerina who falls in love with an American news correspondent. He decided to read George Feifer's novel that was the basis for the movie. He scoured the bookshops of London’s Charing Cross Road for the book, but came up empty-handed. As he waited at the station for his train home, Hopkins noticed a book lying forgotten on a bench. It was a dog-eared copy of The Girl from Petrovka, with notes scrawled in pencil in the margins. Wait, the story gets even better. When Hopkins and the author met sometime later, Feifer said a friend had borrowed his copy of the novel and then lost it somewhere in London. You guessed it; it was the very same book that Hopkins had found at Charing Cross station.