No Idiot Need Apply

Feb 22, 2012 | Literature

First editions of Albert Grope: The Story of a Belated Victorian (1931) and Grope Carries On (1932).

We recently acquired an attractive pair of novels telling “the unassuming story of a self-made business man in a South London suburb” through the early years of the twentieth century. The impoverished protagonist, Albert Grope, responds to a card in a second-hand bookseller’s window that reads: “Wanted intelligent boy for this shop. No idiot need apply,” and from these – surely unpromising – beginnings succeeds in developing his own thriving advertising business. The second part takes up the story at the outbreak of the First World War when “fired by his native patriotism … he takes up voluntary work in the department of  Minor Equipment in order that his remarkable abilities for business may contribute towards national victory.” Both volumes are first editions, and each is signed and dated by the author.

My favourite thing about these is the dust jacket of the first volume, which depicts the old second-hand bookshop, including the sign:

Wanted: Intelligent boy for this shop. No idiot need apply.

The author of these volumes, F. O. Mann, graduated from Balliol in 1909, and was immediately appointed a junior inspector of the Board of Education. In 1914 he was promoted to inspector, transferring to the Ministry of Munitions in 1915, and to the Ministry of Labour in 1919, where he served until he returned in 1922 to Education. He edited an edition of the works of Thomas Deloney for the Clarendon Press in 1911, and published some volumes of poetry in the 1920s, but it was with the character Albert Grope that he “made his mark” (obituary, The Times, 28 June, 1935). At his death he was only 49, and a colleague contributing an appreciation to Mann’s obituary remarks on his “robust good sense, his unfailing wit and cheerfulness flashed and sparkled with effortless gaiety and charm it was hoped … would sooner or later find adequate expression in his novels and poetry. Alas, successful as Albert Grope was, this will never be: if ever there was a man who was clearly greater than anything he wrote it was F.O.M.” Uncommon thus, a highly appealing, if little known, tale of Edwardian life. We’d be particularly interested to find out whether anyone has read these books, and what they thought of them!