Frank Percy Doel (14 July 1908 – 22 December 1968) was a British antiquarian bookseller for Marks & Co in London who achieved posthumous fame as the recipient of a series of humorous letters from American author Helene Hanff, to which he scrupulously and, at first, very formally replied.
On leaving school, Doel started his first, and only, job with Marks & Co, an antiquarian bookshop, located at 84 Charing Cross Road, London.
Nora Doel describes a New Year's Eve at which Lona Cohen (aka Helen Kroger) ...arrived looking very exotic in a long black evening dress.
[7]By the late 1960s Doel was running the business virtually single handed, Marks having died and Cohen too elderly to oversee day-to-day operations.
He died from peritonitis from a ruptured appendix on 22 December 1968 and his funeral was attended by almost the whole of London antiquarian book trade on New Year's Day 1969. "