CANR
WORK TITLE: FABER & FABER
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.tobyfaber.co.uk/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: English
LAST VOLUME: CA 288
wife and daughter
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1965, in Cambridge, England; married; children: two daughers.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Managing director, Faber and Faber, London, England, retired, 2001; Chairman, Faber Music; public speaker.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
A former managing director of the British publishing firm Faber and Faber, founded by his grandfather, Toby Faber resigned his position in 2001 to embark on a writing career. Since that time, he has produced two widely praised books on historical craftspeople of genius: Stradivari’s Genius: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection and Fabergé’s Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire. He is also the author of the 2019 history of the publishing house he was once part of, Faber & Faber: The Untold Story, a publication to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of that venerable British publishing house.
Stradivari’s Genius is an exploration of the methods and mastery of Antonio Stradivari, the eighteenth-century Italian luthier who produced the world’s most renowned and valuable stringed instruments. In his research, Faber studied previous volumes on Stradivari, interviewed experts, examined auction records, and visited Cremona, Italy, the site of the Stradivari workshop.
Since Stradivari’s death in 1737, scientists and luthiers have been struggling to understand the techniques that allowed him to create the finest musical instruments in history. The precise methods Stradivari used to select, prepare, and assemble wood and strings into a perfect instrument are unknown, and it seems that in the nearly three centuries since, no one has been able to match the Stradivari sound. For the author, the secrets of master violinmaking serve as a pretext to recount the stories of six surviving examples (five violins and one cello) from Stradivari’s workshop in Cremona, a city that was home to several violinmaking families. In the book, Faber discusses famous musicians and dealers, including violinist Niccolò Paganini, cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Jacqueline du Pré, and the child prodigy Marie Hall. These artists, to a great extent, were possessed by the Stradivari magic. Robert M. Tilendis in the online Green Man Review describes the book as a “deliciously gossipy view not only of distinguished performers, but of the sometimes laughable, sometimes pathetic activities of heirs, dealers, performers, and later violin makers, not all of whom were necessarily scrupulous … an entertaining and thoughtful essay on genius and its legacy, with lively side trips through the foibles of the musical world.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer praised the book as a “stylish account [that] savors Stradivari’s marvelous acoustics” and his instruments’ “individual personalities … while exploring the science behind them.” Eugenia Zukerman in the New York Times commented that “Faber explores the technical mysteries of Stradivari’s art with an ease that respects the integrity of the subject without being pedantic.”
The creation of Carl Fabergé’s intricately bejeweled Easter eggs inspired Faber to write a second title, Fabergé’s Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire. The story of the Fabergé egg began in 1885, when the Russian Tsar Alexander III offered the first example as an Easter gift to his wife, Marie Federovna. The egg so pleased Marie that Fabergé was asked for a new one the next year. The eggs became a holiday tradition in the Romanov palace, with Alexander and then his successor Nicholas II commanding a new egg every year until the downfall of Nicholas and the Romanov dynasty in 1917. The association with the Russian royal family lent respectability to the house of Fabergé, founded by a refugee from western Europe. The business soon thrived from the demands of wealthy customers seeking to emulate the tsar’s taste and generosity. As the years past, the Fabergé workshop strived to constantly outdo itself; the eggs grew more elaborate and their construction more ingenious, with beautifully enameled and gilded exteriors hiding astounding encased miniatures, which included wind-up clockwork birds, miniature portraits, and a model of the Trans-Siberian Express. For the doomed Russian aristocracy, the imperial family made the gift of Fabergé eggs an annual custom, and the fashion for similar jeweled creations spread to the other royal dynasties of Europe. At the Paris 1900 Exposition, Fabergé and his eggs created a sensation. In Russia the fashion lasted right up until the 1917 Revolution, which put a violent end to all such royal excesses and to the Romanov dynasty itself.
After the Russian Revolution, which most of the fifty original eggs survived, Fabergé was brought to the United States by oil magnate Armand Hammer, who bought several examples from the Soviet government, mounted a traveling exhibition in the United States and introduced them to his own country’s wealthy aristocracy. Eventually, the eggs became a favorite plaything for Malcolm Forbes, one of the most famous capitalists in the world, and they now have become a highly desired collection item for the Russian oligarchs who emerged after the fall of the Soviet government. In a review of Fabergé’s Eggs for BookPage, Alison Hood called the book a “well- crafted, well-told tale,” and noted that the author’s interest in “provenance reappears as he transports readers into Fabergé’s workshops, the decadent Romanov imperial courts, Russia’s revolutionary upheavals, the pre-World War II Golden Age and beyond.” Sam Leith offered effusive praise for the book in the Spectator, writing that “Faber has produced, at just the length to suit it, a hugely enjoyable and informative account of the making and afterlife of the best-known examples of the jeweller’s art.”
Faber mines ninety years of correspondence, board minutes, and other factual material from the archives of one of the pillars of British publishing in his Faber & Faber. Founded by Geoffrey Faber, survivor of the Western Front in World War I and a man who failed as director of a brewing company before going into publishing, Faber & Faber is one of the few and greatest of independent publishers left in the world. Toby Faber goes behind the scenes to show how the company was actually conceived, how it gathered an amazing and eclectic clutch of editors, including the poet T.S. Eliot and later Charles Monteith. By 1929, the firm was rebranded Faber & Faber after the original investors were bought out. Among the poets it published are W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. Writers and playwrights included Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, William Golding, and P.D. James.
As Faber shows in his book, the publishing house survived the paper shortages of World War II, some bad decisions (Eliot turned down George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example), and editorial fights over authors and poets to include in the Faber list. In the 1980s, new editorial blood, including Robert McCrum, helped the firm to secure contemporary authors such as Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, Milan Kundera, and Paul Auster. By 2018, thirteen Faber authors had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Reviewing Faber & Faber in the New Yorker, the publisher Jonathan Galassi, noted that a “literary publishing house is a strange beast—a business, yes, but also less and more than one.” In this regard, Galassi went on to observe: “The persistence of Faber & Faber, which is now celebrating ninety years as an independent publisher, makes for a remarkable case study … , as is demonstrated in Faber & Faber. … The Faber story certainly speaks volumes about the mix of passion, shrewdness, and luck that it takes to keep such an operation afloat.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer also had a positive assessment of the work, commenting: “Brimming with humanizing details and unforgettable literary personalities, Faber’s compilation will be a delight for literature fans.” Irish Times critic Dermot Bolger similarly wrote: “For someone writing both a family history and a publishing one, Tony Faber deals fairly with the personalities, conflicts, failures and courageous decisions that shaped the firm. His format is fascinating.” Likewise, Booklist contributor Bill Ott termed the book a “surprisingly jaunty, thoroughly readable look at literary publishing in the twentieth century.” Ott further commented, “Anyone with an interest in the history of English-language publishing won’t want to miss this thoroughly charming history.” Likewise, a Kirkus Reviews critic concluded: “Students of modernist literature and publishing history will find this a pleasure.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Spectator, July 1, 2005, Alfred S. Regnery, review of Stradivari’s Genius: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection.
Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, December 18, 2004, “The Story of an Exquisite Musical Instrument.”
Booklist, March 15, 2005, Alan Hirsch, review of Stradivari’s Genius, p. 1255; September 15, 2008, Margaret Flanagan, review of Fabergé’s Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire, p. 12; July 1, 2019, Bill Ott, review of Faber & Faber: The Untold History of a Great Publishing House, p. 6.
Bookseller, October 12, 2001, “Faber Hits Right Note,” p. 8; October 26, 2001, “Straus Snaps Up Faber,” p. 6; May 7, 2004, “Another String to His Bow: Toby Faber Has Embarked on a New Career with the Story of the World’s Most Famous Violins,” p. 30; August 26, 2005, “Faber Signs Second for Picador,” p. 13.
Book World, May 1, 2005, “String Theory,” p. 15.
California Bookwatch, January 1, 2009, review of Fabergé’s Eggs.
Contemporary Review, March 1, 2005, review of “Stradivarius: One Cello, Five Violins and a Genius,” review of Stradivari’s Genius, p. 188.
Financial Times, August 7, 2004, “A Sound Marriage the Ultimate Rebuke to the Modern Age,” p. 30.
History: Review of New Books, June 22, 2005, Stefan Hersh, review of Stradivari’s Genius, p. 156.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2005, review of Stradivari’s Genius, p. 162; August 15, 2008, review of Fabergé’s Eggs; July 1, 2019, review of Faber & Faber.
Library Journal, March 15, 2005, Larry Lipkis, review of Stradivari’s Genius, p. 87.
Music & Letters, August 1, 2005, “Stradivarius: Five Violins, One Cello and a Genius,” review of Stradivari’s Genius, p. 476.
New Statesman, May 10, 2019, review of Faber & Faber, p, 41.
New York Times Book Review, April 24, 2005, Eugenia Zukerman, “The Master Builder,” p. 23.
Publishers Weekly, February 14, 2005, review of Stradivari’s Genius, p. 62; August 4, 2008, review of Fabergé’s Eggs, p. 55.
Sarasota Herald Tribune, May 29, 2005, “A Detective Tale of Instrumental Intrigue,” p. 4.
Spectator, March 29, 2008, Sam Leith, “Both Sublime and Ridiculous,” review of Fabergé’s Eggs, p. 42.
Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2008, “Oval Objects of Desire: Fabergé’s Eggs, by Toby Faber,” p. 17.
ONLINE
BookPage, http://www.bookpage.com/ (June 10, 2009), Alison Hood, “The Secret Life of Eggs.”
Directions to Orthodoxy, http://directionstoorthodoxy.org/ (June 10, 2009), Sam Leith, “Sam Leith Reviews Toby Faber’s History of Fabergé Eggs.”
Green Man Review, http://www.greenmanreview.com/ (June 10, 2009), Robert M. Tilendis, review of Stradivari’s Genius.
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (June 20, 2019), John Mullan, review of Faber & Faber.
Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (May 25, 2019), Dermot Bolger, review of Faber & Faber.
New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/ (July 23, 2019), Jonathan Galassi, review of Faber & Faber.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (June 13, 2019), review of Faber & Faber.
Random House, http://www.randomhouse.com/ (June 10, 2009), brief author biography.
Toby Faber, https://www.tobyfaber.co.uk (August 15, 2019).
I was born in Cambridge, England, in 1965. When I left university in 1987 it was to become an investment banker with Barclays de Zoete Wedd, a firm that is now, sadly, defunct. After business school in France I became a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. In 1996, I joined Faber and Faber, a publishing firm founded by my grandfather in the 1920s. I was managing director there until 2001.
Now I am a non-executive director of Faber and Faber and Chairman of its sister company Faber Music, but I spend most of my time writing, with two books published to date - one on the violin-maker Antonio Stradivari, the other on the Imperial Easter Eggs made by Carl Fabergé. Both are narrative histories intended for a general readership - longer on words than pictures.
You could say that my career trajectory is one that has taken me away from money towards quality of life. My experience as a publisher undoubtedly helped me become a published author: I knew how to write proposals, and it wasn't hard for me to get an agent. Neither of my books, however, is published by Faber and Faber. In the US, the publisher of my first two books is Random House, and the UK it is Macmillan.
I have given lectures about Antonio Stradivari at The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Library of Congress, The Huntington Library in Pasadena, The City University of New York, Central St Martins College of Art and Design, The Chester Literature Festival, The Presteigne Music Festival, The Royal Geographical Society and The Cheltenham Music Festival, and about Carl Fabergé at the V&A (again), The Hillwood Museum in Washington DC, The Walters Museum in Baltimore, The Theatre Royal, Bath, The Hay Festival, the Harrogate International Festival and The Royal Asiatic Society. The lectures at the RGS and the RAS were in aid of KINOE, a charity founded by my wife. A lecture I gave at Holts Academy of Jewellery in Hatton Garden in aid of the charity, Spiro Ark was a great experience, as the lecture space was a jewellery workshop, surrounded by workbenches very similar to those you see in the old photographs of the Faberge workshops.
I enjoy public speaking, am always open to bookings and am on the NADFAS directory of lecturers. For synopses of my lectures and study days please see the relevant page on the sidebar.
I am a trustee of Yale University Press (UK), a great academic publisher. I recently stepped down as vice-Chairman of the Authors Licensing and Collection Society, or ALCS (an organisation I would urge every author to join), but remain a non-executive director of the Copyright Licensing Agency, CLA.
I live in London with my wife and two daughters. The photo above shows me in Wales, in the hills above Dolgellau, where we spend a lot of our time.
My main agent is Caroline Dawnay at United Agents. In the US I am represented by Zoe Pagnamenta.
As the grandson of Faber’s founder, Toby Faber grew up steeped in the company’s books and its stories. He was Faber’s managing director for four years and remains a non-executive director and chairman of sister company Faber Music. He has written two celebrated works of non-fiction, Stradivarius and Fabergé’s Eggs, and his first novel, Close to the Edge, will be published by Muswell Press in 2019. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters.
Toby Faber was managing director of Faber & Faber for four years until 2001, having previously been an investment banker and a management consultant. Since then he has written two works of narrative history, Stradivarius, which was a New York Times bestseller, and Fabergé’s Eggs, published by Macmillan in the UK and Random House in the US, and translated into eight languages between them.
Toby remains on the Faber & Faber board and is Chairman of its sister company, Faber Music. He is also a director of the Copyright Licensing Agency, having recently stepped down as Vice Chair of the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society. Toby is an active NADFAS lecturer and is working on his third book.
QUOTE:
surprisingly jaunty, thoroughly readable look at literary publishing in the twentieth century
Anyone with an interest in the history of English-language publishing won't want to miss this thoroughly charming history
* Faber & Faber: The Untold History of a Great Publishing House.
By Toby Faber.
Aug. 2019.400p. illus. Faber & Faber, $28 (97805713390441.070.5.
Anyone with an interest in the history of English-language publishing won't want to miss this thoroughly charming history of the venerable British firm of Faber & Faber, which is celebrating its ninetieth anniversary. The story of how Faber has managed to remain independent for nearly a century--and during a time of rampant consolidation in the industry--has much to do with luck, of course, but also with determined resilience, especially from the founder, Geoffrey Faber, who died in 1961. For most readers, though, the main point of interest here will be the substantial role in Faber's history played by its most famous editor, T. S. Eliot, who was hired by Faber in the twenties and whose stature as a poet and critic gave the firm instant credibility. Faber's reputation as a cutting-edge poetry publisher only grew as Eliot brought W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Philip Larkin, and Ted Hughes to the house during the next several decades. But Eliot's greatest contribution came later, after his death, with the sale to Andrew Lloyd Webber of the rights to Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats--the eventual success of the musical Cats did more than any individual book to keep the company solvent and independent through the decades. Author Tony Faber, Geoffrey's grandson, wisely eschews a straightforward narrative history in favor of an oral-history approach, drawing liberally on correspondence between publishers, editors, and authors, but also supplying valuable connective tissue in the form of brief but often witty introductions and commentary. The result is a surprisingly jaunty, thoroughly readable look at literary publishing in the twentieth century.--Bill Ott
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ott, Bill. "Faber & Faber: The Untold History of a Great Publishing House." Booklist, 1 July 2019, p. 6. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A595704914/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=69bc0813. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A595704914
QUOTE:
Students of modernist literature and publishing history will find this a pleasure."
Faber, Toby FABER & FABER Faber & Faber (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 8, 13 ISBN: 978-0-5713-3904-4
A namesake and descendant delivers a richly detailed biography of the distinguished British publishing house.
After World War I, returning veteran Geoffrey Faber found himself relieved from a job for which he didn't have much talent, running a brewery, and talked his way into a medical publishing house, setting about diversifying the list with a literary magazine, works of fiction, and "legal cram books." While the last never came about, writes Faber (Faberge's Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire, 2008, etc.), Geoffrey eventually shaped a list dominated by literature, publishing many of the greats. As he wrote to a friend, the company's new premises on Russell Square provided an incentive "to build up as fine a publishing business as we can to inhabit it!" As the author writes in this documentary biography of the company, Geoffrey was fortunate in taking on the American poet T.S. Eliot, so much an Anglophile as to be more English than the English, as an early editor. Eliot often rejected submissions, but he also encouraged work by poets such as W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, helping make Faber a major presence in the literary world from the 1930s on. At the same time, other editors and directors brought in notable writers such as William Golding, who delivered a manuscript that he called A Cry of Children, soon to be superseded by a Faber editor's much more memorable Lord of the Flies. The author isn't shy about sharing the fiscal details of publishing, opening with the old adage that the way to make a small fortune in the business is to start with a large one. He also provides insight into the publishing work of rock legend Pete Townshend, who, despairing of the future of his band, came to work for Faber & Faber in 1983, writing what one colleague called "good old-fashioned publishing reports, very serious, very diligent reports on the books we're considering."
Students of modernist literature and publishing history will find this a pleasure.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Faber, Toby: FABER & FABER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591279124/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b0f336aa. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591279124
QUOTE:
vibrant picture of publishing before it became corporate
The venerable publishing house turns 90 this year and the founder's grandson and former managing director has written a quirky history of the firm that has an unrivalled author roster, featuring everyone from TS Eliot and Ted Hughes to William Golding and Kazuo Ishiguro. This is not a conventional chronological tale; Faber dips liberally and entertainingly into the company archives, reproduces letters and previously unseen photographs, as well as forays into jacket design and his own memories to paint a vibrant picture of publishing before it became corporate.
Faber & Faber, 448pp. 20 [pounds sterling]
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Faber, Toby. "Faber & Faber: The Untold Story." New Statesman, 10 May 2019, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A586469456/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=86eaf3e0. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A586469456
Faber & Faber: by Toby Faber review – the untold story of a publishing giant
They turned down Ulysses and Animal Farm, but still shaped 20th‑century literature
John Mullan
Thu 20 Jun 2019 12.00 BST
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‘Old-school gentility and literary adventure.’ Geoffrey Faber, centre, and TS Eliot, left, at a Faber & Faber directors meeting in 1944 to discuss how best to use the paper ration. Photograph: Picture Post/Getty Images
A
ll publishing houses have archives, but for anyone interested in 20th-century literature the archive of Faber & Faber is a fabled treasure house. This is the firm that was, as Toby Faber puts it, “midwife at the birth of modernism”. In 1924 Faber’s grandfather, Geoffrey Faber, aspiring poet and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had been installed as chairman of the Scientific Press, recently inherited by another All Souls fellow, Maurice Gwyer. It published mostly books and journals for nurses. Geoffrey Faber renamed it and started making it into a literary publisher. Within his first year he had installed TS Eliot as a fellow director and acquired his backlist.
The firm would go on to publish Ezra Pound, WH Auden and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Then Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney: a poetry list to beat all others. Academics have always itched to get into the Faber archive, to get at the letters and memos that record how this 20th-century canon was made. Toby Faber has rights of entry. He has given us a highly selective anthology rather than a narrative: his book is made up of extracts from original documents (mostly letters, but also memos, board minutes and blurbs), with spare comments from himself.
Faber & Faber allowed The Bodley Head to get Ulysses; “Feebler and Fumbler”, Joyce called the firm
Above all, his book illustrates the firm’s commercial precariousness. In the early years, Faber’s accountant sternly counselled Geoffrey Faber to dump the literary stuff and concentrate on the firm’s only worthwhile commodity, the Nursing Mirror. He was both contradicted and vindicated in 1929 when this periodical was sold for £190,000 – a huge sum at the time – ensuring the survival of the publishing house for the following decade or two. In his struggles to ensure his firm’s survival, Faber emerges as a rather heroic figure, by turns pooterish and visionary. His letters are disarmingly candid. He confesses to Marie Stopes (in the process of declining to publish her book of poems, Love Songs for Young Lovers) that he himself has been a would-be poet, whose inspiration has withered, but that publishing modern poetry “has in some queer way satisfied my own frustrated ambition”. Eventually, in 1941, Faber did publish his collected poems; they have not come down to posterity. He did make good picks, relying on Eliot’s impressive taste.
Pinterest
‘I am inclined to think that we should take this man now,’ wrote TS Eliot of Ted Hughes (pictured). Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer
When the firm announced its first three collections by new poets in 1930, one was Auden’s Poems. Eliot spotted the talents of Marianne Moore and Louis MacNeice (even though the latter had sent his poems without any covering letter or return address). The cover blurb for MacNeice’s poems epitomises the firm’s austere manner of praise: “dour without sentimentality … his work is intelligible but unpopular”. Eliot plumped for Samuel Beckett. When he was shown Hughes’s unpublished The Hawk in the Rain, he simply scrawled: “I am inclined to think that we should take this man now.”
There were also mistakes. From fear of prosecution, Faber & Faber hesitated about Ulysses, allowing the Bodley Head to get it; “Feebler and Fumbler”, Joyce called the firm. Eliot turned down both George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and, later, Animal Farm. He thought the latter a “distinguished piece of writing” but worried (in 1944) whether it was “the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time”. Profitable opportunities were lost. Several letters chart the falling out with CP Snow, who was convinced that Faber was not striving sufficiently to sell his books and who patrolled London bookshops in the weeks before Christmas to see if they were stocking copies. He had the temerity to acquire an agent, who duly pressured the firm even more. Snow left, and duly produced a series of bestsellers.
Lord of the Flies? ‘Rubbish’. Animal Farm? Too risky – Faber’s secrets revealed
Read more
The blend of old-school gentility and literary adventure is epitomised by Faber director Charles Monteith. As a young fellow of All Souls (another one), he wrote out of the blue to Geoffrey Faber saying that he fancied working “in a ‘booky’ atmosphere”. A year later, he was in. Monteith became a fabled talent spotter, recovering Lord of the Flies from the slush pile. Toby Faber reproduces the letter from William Golding, a Salisbury school teacher, over which a Faber reader had written: “Rubbish & dull. Pointless. Reject”. It is Monteith who reads three poems by Heaney in the New Statesman and duly hooks him for his first collection, published in 1966. Ditto Paul Muldoon, six years later.
The funniest document in the collection is a letter from Monteith to an official at the Travellers’ Club, apologising for the unconventional garb of the poet Thom Gunn, whom he had invited to luncheon. “Since he was educated at Bedales and at Trinity College, Cambridge, I took it for granted that he would be aware of the ordinary social conventions in matters such as this.” But Gunn had been living in San Francisco and appeared in fringed leather jacket and cowboy boots.
Financial calculation continued to vie with literary high-mindedness in later years. In 1981 an employee wrote a note to chairman Matthew Evans complaining about the decision to publish a Not the Nine o’Clock News spinoff annual. The firm existed “to produce books which can be considered important”. (This unacceptably frivolous publication earned the firm more than £250,000 in profits.) Extracts from board minutes show that only royalties from Cats and the Spitting Image book kept the firm going in the 1980s. Andrew Lloyd Webber may or may not have enriched the musical stage, but he has done a great service to literary publishing.
• Faber & Faber: the Untold Story by Toby Faber (RRP £20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
QUOTE:
For someone writing both a family history and a publishing one, Tony Faber deals fairly with the personalities, conflicts, failures and courageous decisions that shaped the firm. His format is fascinating
Faber & Faber: The Untold Story – What do publishers actually do all day?
Review: A fasctinating history of the independent publisher, told by an insider
A meeting of the board of directors at publishing house Faber & Faber in 1944 to discuss how best to use their paper ration. Photograph: Getty Images
A meeting of the board of directors at publishing house Faber & Faber in 1944 to discuss how best to use their paper ration. Photograph: Getty Images
Dermot Bolger
Sat, May 25, 2019, 06:00
First published:
Sat, May 25, 2019, 06:00
Book Title:
Faber and Faber: The Untold Story
ISBN-13:
978-0571339044
Author:
Toby Faber
Publisher:
Faber & Faber
Guideline Price:
£20.00
On my first visit to the offices of Penguin Books in 1990 I remember overhearing the receptionist busily answering phone calls with the greetings, “Hello Penguin”, “Hello Bodley Head”, “Hello Viking”, “Hello Michael Joseph”, “Hello Hamish Hamilton”.
It was a roll call of publishing houses swallowed up by a conglomerate that was later swallowed by another conglomerate. This is no criticism of Penguin who adapted to economic circumstances to continue to publish excellent books. Publishers have survived through amalgamations for decades, resulting in a diminishing pool of gatekeepers for new authors to get past.
This makes the story of independent publisher, Faber & Faber, all the more fascinating. Toby Faber is the grandson of Geoffrey Faber who founded the firm in 1924, despite reservations by his mother, reluctant to see a family trust risked on a perilous enterprise.
Independence
This book is subtitled “The Untold Story” as against “The Full Story”. A full history would need to be written by someone more impartial than a former managing editor whose family owns 50 per cent of the shares: the remainder owned by a trust established by T S Eliot’s widow. This shareholding allows it to retain its independence, although as this book makes clear, dire economic circumstances often meant that it came close to being swallowed up.
For someone writing both a family history and a publishing one, Tony Faber deals fairly with the personalities, conflicts, failures and courageous decisions that shaped the firm. His format is fascinating. The book primarily consists of extracts from letters and memos composed on the run, snap literary judgements jotted down while its staff juggled the fraught financial intricacies of keeping the firm solvent.
The remaining text is a commentary to contextualise a story that begins when Geoffrey Faber commenced a fraught partnership with Sir Maurice and Lady Gwyer, owners of the Scientific Press, whose primary income came from a magazine called The Nursing Mirror. The new firm, originally named Faber & Gwyer, aimed to build both literary and medical backlists.
Talent
Geoffrey Faber’s talent was as a recruiter of talent, quick to act in 1924 when alert by a friend to a potential new editor – an American poet (but “strongly anti-American, as you would suppose”) working for Lloyds (“so you may take it that he has been trained in business”) who “is obscure and allusive, but I have faith that he will come out of his obscurity and write something really fine”.
I love the notion of someone regarding T S Eliot – a decade after The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock – as someone who might one day “write something really fine”. But such snap observations work brilliantly in bringing us into the mind-set of the period.
Geoffrey Faber’s second recruit was Richard de le Mare – son of the poet, Walter – chosen because he “seems to have plenty of practical ability (as the sons of mystical poets very often do!)”. With Eliot and de le Mare building a literary list, Geoffrey pondered a possible new magazine, aimed at the 150,000 women employed as nannies. This would have “a clear and definite policy… to raise the status and encourage the professional sense of children’s nurses, provided that nothing is done or said to disturb the equanimity of mistresses”.
By 1929 the fractious Gwyers were bought out and the firm, rebranded as Faber & Faber, enjoying its first commercial success with Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, published anonymously. That same year Eliot juggled the difficulties of publishing an edition of Ulysses (his caution won out, with Bodley Head taking the risk) with cultivating “a boy named Auden… I think he has some merit”.
Faber poets
We glimpse a succession of major Faber poets from Stephen Spender in 1930 (“the lad needs and deserves encouragement”) to Seamus Heaney in 1965 (“not quite strong enough for publication, but… does indeed show definite promise”).
Not all decisions are wise. We see Eliot reject George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (“decidedly too short… and seems to me too loosely constructed”). Even when accepting a future bestseller like Who Moved the Stone in 1929, Eliot’s financial caution was apparent: “I suggest of course no advance and modest royalties.”
He could have never believed that his children’s verse, reluctantly dragged from him by Geoffrey Faber, would help to save the firm, when reimagined as the musical “Cats”. But one pleasure of this book is how these men (few female voices are heard), slowly growing old along (de le Mere needs to be ousted in 1970) rarely have time to consider how posterity will judge their decisions. They are too caught up with wartime paper shortages, bombs falling on Mrs Faber’s garage, battles with censorship (culminating in discussions about how many “fucks” John McGahern can use in “The Barracks”) and keeping the show on the road. Filled with brilliant cameos, this is for anyone who wonders what publishers actually do all day.
QUOTE:
Brimming with humanizing details and unforgettable literary personalities, Faber’s compilation will be a delight for literature fans
Faber & Faber: The Untold Story
Edited by Toby Faber. Faber & Faber, $28 (400p) ISBN 978-0-5713-3904-4
Culled from 90 years’ worth of correspondence, board minutes, and other material from the Faber & Faber archives, this compilation from Faber (Fabergé’s Eggs), the company’s former managing director (and its founder’s grandson), offers a uniquely close-up view of 20th-century literary history. It includes fascinating stories about now-canonical works, such as how Lord of the Flies was published by the company despite being rejected by a reader’s note that dismissed the initial manuscript as an “absurd & uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the colonies.” However, its greatest value lies in revealing the personalities of Faber & Faber’s key figures, including Geoffrey Faber, who founded it in 1929; despite the company’s name, he had no partner, but simply reasoned, as a friend advised him, “You can’t have too much of a good thing.” Perhaps most notably, the book gives a new view of longtime Faber & Faber director T.S. Eliot, who comes across as humane, witty, and deeply dedicated to the company, and whose friendship with Geoffrey Faber emerges as one of the 20th century’s great unsung literary partnerships. Brimming with humanizing details and unforgettable literary personalities, Faber’s compilation will be a delight for literature fans. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers Coleridge & White.(Aug.)
QUOTE:
literary publishing house is a strange beast—a business, yes, but also less and more than one
The persistence of Faber & Faber, which is now celebrating ninety years as an independent publisher, makes for a remarkable case study ... , as is demonstrated in Faber & Faber: The Untold Story,
... The Faber story certainly speaks volumes about the mix of passion, shrewdness, and luck that it takes to keep such an operation afloat
The Unlikely History of Faber & Faber
By Jonathan GalassiJuly 23, 2019
The poet and dramatist T. S. Eliot helped make Faber & Faber the home of literary
literary publishing house is a strange beast—a business, yes, but also less and more than one
The persistence of Faber & Faber, which is now celebrating ninety years as an independent publisher, makes for a remarkable case study ... , as is demonstrated in Faber & Faber: The Untold Story, modernism.Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty
Aliterary publishing house is a strange beast—a business, yes, but also less and more than one. Publishers sometimes develop exalted notions about their cultural status; sometimes these notions become broadly shared. Names like Cape; Einaudi; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Fischer; Gallimard; Grove Press; Knopf; New Directions; Scribner; and the granddaddy of them all, John Murray, Lord Byron’s publisher, are signifiers that once stood for the tastes and aspirations of the men—for they were virtually all men—who founded these institutions. Some have survived for generations, but more often they’ve been absorbed into larger organizations, which, by definition, lack personality.
The persistence of Faber & Faber, which is now celebrating ninety years as an independent publisher, makes for a remarkable case study in this regard, as is demonstrated in “Faber & Faber: The Untold Story,” a new narrative history put together by Toby Faber, the grandson of the firm’s founder, Geoffrey Faber, and a former managing director of the firm. There aren’t many independent publishing houses of Faber’s scale anymore—what might be called small majors. They’ve either resolutely remained small presses, like New Directions or Graywolf or City Lights, or have been bought by bigger firms, as F.S.G. was, by the Holtzbrinck group, of Germany, in 1994. (One American exception is W. W. Norton, which has a strong academic branch and is owned coöperatively by its employees.) What “The Untold Story” makes clear are the ways in which editorial sensibility and independence—renewed and reasserted at key points in the firm’s history—have combined with sheer luck, over the course of nearly a century, to sustain an operation that might very well have gone under more than once.
The story begins when Alsina Gwyer, whose husband was the judge and academic Maurice Gwyer, inherited a share of the Scientific Press from her father. The primary source of profit for the Scientific Press was a magazine aimed at nurses called The Nursing Mirror. Alsina and Maurice, who was a fellow at All Souls, the storied graduate college at Oxford, wished to diversify the press’s offerings. Maurice enlisted Geoffrey Faber, an unsuccessful brewer and sometime poet and novelist in his thirties whose “most distinguished achievement” to date, Toby writes, was probably that he himself had won an All Souls fellowship. Faber proposed adding “legal cram books,” foreign fiction, and a literary magazine. At the All Souls high table one day, Faber described his plans to the journalist Charles Whibley, who suggested that the company acquire a magazine he had written for, The Criterion, which had been founded, just a few years before, by T. S. Eliot. In April, 1925, Eliot joined the firm, renamed Faber & Gwyer, as a director, with the understanding that it would publish his magazine and his books.
Alfred Harcourt, a leading American publisher of the time, whose writers included Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, pooh-poohed Faber & Gwyer as “a bunch of Oxford amateurs; won’t last.” After a series of struggles between Faber and the Gwyers over the direction of the company, The Nursing Mirror was sold, in 1929, and the Gwyers were bought out. Faber offered to rename the enterprise Faber & Morley—after Frank Morley, an American who played a crucial role in the company’s early development, and would later go to work for Harcourt. But, in a rare flourish of wit, Faber instead named himself as his own partner. (There was only ever one Faber at Faber & Faber.) Geoffrey Faber was a straightforward, conventional, occasionally irritable but fundamentally decent soul whose diary, as quoted by Toby, reveals an endearing self-doubt. “It is hard to describe him as a great publisher with a brilliant editorial eye,” Toby writes, “but he had an instinctive understanding of finance and, even more, knew how to get the best from his fellow directors.” Morley later observed that “Faber’s style was his team.” He deliberated shrewdly in choosing his colleagues, whom he then gave his full trust.
The key figure to whom he gave this trust was Eliot—who, as agreed, gave Faber his books, starting with “Poems 1909-1925.” Eliot brought in his friends, too, including Ezra Pound and James Joyce. (In America, Pound got his disciple James Laughlin to start New Directions in order to publish his work; the fountainheads of modernism thus were responsible for both a revolution in letters and the vehicles for its promotion.) Afraid of prosecution for obscenity, Faber & Faber passed on “Ulysses,” but it published individual sections of Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” and then issued it in toto as “Finnegans Wake,” in 1939.
Faber & Faber’s board of directors discuss how best to use their paper ration, in 1944.Photograph by Felix Man and Kurt Hutton / Picture Post / Getty
With new writers, Eliot tended to express interest early but was slow to make a commitment. Gradually, though, he started to bring younger poets onto the Faber list, even if not all of them were destined for immortality. In the autumn of 1930, Faber & Faber offered not only W. H. Auden’s “Poems” but P. P. Graves’s “The Pursuit” and “The Ecliptic,” by Joseph Gordon MacLeod. In one of the more illuminating letters quoted in “The Untold Story,” Eliot explains his reasons for rejecting the “sound, earnest and educated verse” of a manuscript that the house was considering. “I think it would be a better policy for F. & F. to make a bad blunder in publishing the wrong poet,” he writes, “than to blur their reputation by publishing too many respectable ones.”
“I am not sure that Eliot’s best qualification to become a publisher wasn’t the fact that he had worked in a Bank,” Morley wrote, years later. In the thirties, according to Morley, Eliot was reading more manuscripts than anyone else at Faber, writing reader’s reports (“on Eliot was dumped anything or anybody particularly difficult”), jacket copy, and thousands of letters. He had a sharp eye for business, too. In a tribute to the firm published a decade ago, Matthew Evans, the chairman of Faber & Faber in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, described an angry letter that Eliot wrote to Faber in the late forties, which is not quoted in Toby’s book. The gist of it was that “it was OK to publish good books, but that it was necessary to publicise and sell the books,” too.
Eliot’s first best-seller was “Who Moved the Stone?,” by Frank Morison, “a considered and well-written discussion of the Resurrection,” which was published in 1930. He rejected George Orwell twice: “Down and Out in Paris and London,” in 1932 (“decidedly too short … and too loosely constructed”), and “Animal Farm,” in 1944 (“we have no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the present time”). By the mid-thirties, F. & F. had become one of London’s leading publishers. “The stamp of acceptance by Eliot came to have more and more significance,” Toby writes. “His reputation fed those of the poets he took on, and theirs fed his as a publisher, so that Faber became the home of literary Modernism.” Indeed, poetry was always at the heart of Eliot’s interest as critic and editor, and it became crucial to Faber & Faber’s identity. After Auden, Eliot took on Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice, and in 1934 proposed a book to Marianne Moore.
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Faber’s knack for fostering Eliot’s editorial instincts is evident in the firm’s debate about Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood,” which the company ultimately did publish, in 1936. The book confounded a number of readers in-house. Eliot insisted that “this may be our last chance to do something remarkable in the way of imaginative literature.” Faber told Eliot and Morley that he “hopelessly failed to see what you both see in Nightwood” but insisted that “if any director is all out over a book or an author, we must do-it-him-her.” And, as he gave in, he offered the time-honored publisher’s parting shot: “I still fail to see how it can sell.”
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During these years, Eliot was editing and writing for The Criterion—he closed it in 1939—and beavering away at home on “Murder in the Cathedral,” “The Family Reunion,” and “Four Quartets,” all while becoming increasingly in demand as a cultural commissar and guru in his spare time. And he was producing poems about pets for his godson Tom Faber, Toby’s father, which would end up in “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which the firm published in 1939. The Faber files also show Uncle Tom, as Eliot was known around the office, in what was, for him, an unbuttoned mood, joking with his fellow-directors about his putative ownership of a dance hall called Eliot’s Club: “I may find myself tempted to devote the whole of my attention to the legitimate entertainment industry providing innocent and rhythmical pleasure for peoples’ bodies, instead of conniving at providing so much trash for their minds.”
During the Second World War, business boomed for F. & F., as it did for most publishers. “The public still needed entertainment, and reading was one of the few pastimes compatible with the blackout,” Toby writes. Afterward, though, the company seemed to enter a period of drift. Geoffrey Faber was knighted in 1954, a sign perhaps that a certain trajectory had been fulfilled and the future needed attention. Eliot, by then in his sixties, told Faber that he’d reached a point where “I often feel that any usefulness I had for F. & F. is a thing of the past.” Renewal arrived in the person of Charles Monteith, a reserved, ingratiating Ulsterman and—yes—a fellow of All Souls, who had been injured in the war. He was working unhappily as a barrister in London. In an advice-seeking letter to Faber, he described himself as “incurably ‘literary.’ ” “I’m only really happy in a ‘booky’ atmosphere; buying books, reading books, talking about books.”
Faber came to feel that Monteith might represent a way forward, and Monteith and Eliot had a quiet getting-to-know-you clubman’s dinner. But progress was complicated by what Toby calls an “arch” intervention from John Sparrow, the Waspish Warden of All Souls, who suggested that Monteith had “flair but not taste” and lamented his “coarseness” and lack of “distinction.” Eliot responded cannily:
I am not sure, however, that from the point of view of a firm’s solvency flair is not a more valuable asset than taste. (I have a little flair, in limited areas, but I have found ‘taste’ to some extent a handicap.) I wonder whether, if John S. knew the publishing world as well as we do he would be quite so ‘fastidious.’ How many people are there in the business who have taste as well as flair? And how many men are there in the business whom a person of “fastidiousness” would be wholly unjustified as criticising for “coarseness of fibre”? I should have to rack my brains. C.M. is, no doubt, plebeian; but on one interview it would not occur to me to call him “common”; and (what is the most important) I should be surprised to hear anyone designate him as “vulgar”.
Monteith joined Faber & Faber in 1953. His first acquisition was a novel that had already been slated for rejection, which he picked out of the slush pile, reshaped, and gave a new title: “Lord of the Flies.” Toby writes that he “immediately brought a new sense of purpose to Faber’s literary publishing, acquiring writers whose importance rivals those brought onto the list by Eliot in the 1930s.” He encouraged Philip Larkin—whose novel “A Girl in Winter” Faber had published, in 1947—to submit other work, including poetry, leading the habitually sardonic Larkin to respond, “I am glad you wrote; it did much to dispel my conception of Faber’s as a reproachful father figure.” Among the writers Monteith added to the Faber roster were Samuel Beckett, John Berryman, Ted Hughes (and, posthumously, Sylvia Plath), P. D. James, his countrymen John McGahern and Seamus Heaney (for whom hearing from Faber “was like getting a letter from God the father”), Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, and Paul Muldoon. He also took his own wrong turns, on occasion: in 1965, the year that Eliot died, he put off Barbara Pym with the old saw that “novels are, I’m afraid becoming increasingly difficult to sell nowadays,” thus missing out on her resurgence in the late seventies.
Geoffrey Faber had died a few years before, in 1961. Three years later, the firm’s longtime managing director, Peter du Sautoy, hired Evans, the son of a Faber author, as an assistant. Evans was full of mischief and eager to challenge the self-satisfied Faber status quo. In 1965, he attended the Frankfurt Book Fair with another junior employee, Mary-Kay Wilmers, who is now the editor of the London Review of Books. In a letter to their bosses, they wrote, “Our list of course is respected by everyone, but our publishing methods are not. People feel that we are smug and … don’t work to do our authors or our books justice.” In the seventies, Evans was appointed managing director, and Monteith became chairman. It was an era of general economic hardship in Britain. The Faber & Faber office was allowed to use electricity only on Thursdays through Saturdays, and the company, like many a publishing house of its size in an era of consolidation on both sides of the Atlantic, seemed on the brink of being sold. In 1980, Monteith had to admonish his colleagues that “the results of Incised Effigial Slabs and Monumental Brasses”— books recently published by F. & F.—“should render us forever on our guard against the funereal, however artistically satisfying.”
It was around this time that Robert McCrum, a fresh-faced young reader at Chatto & Windus, was appointed junior editor. McCrum had been on an editorial fellowship in New York, where he’d met the publisher Roger Straus, whose swashbuckling ways Evans admired and, to a degree, emulated. Soon, there was a new version of Faber flair, as McCrum went about creating the fiction brand the firm had long been lacking, with books by Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, Mario Vargas Llosa, Milan Kundera, Paul Auster, and many others. The firm had been revived, editorially, once again.
And then Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to make a musical based on Eliot’s poems about pets. “Cats” premièred in May, 1981, and became an outlandish worldwide success and “a pension fund for all concerned,” in the words of Lloyd Webber. Eliot’s estate received the lyricist’s royalties, and, for F. & F., acting as the estate’s agent, their percentage of the Eliot percentage “gave the firm enough financial headroom for an act of real rejuvenation.” This included paying the advances for McCrum’s writers and, finally, becoming a vertically integrated publisher, selling its own paperbacks instead of licensing reprint rights to larger houses. Evans and McCrum became “partners in crime,” Toby writes, in the go-go eighties; Evans briefly made Pete Townshend, of The Who, an editor, and Private Eye dubbed the firm “Fabber & Fabber.” (Toby refers in passing to “the very necessary distance” that the company has travelled from “the chauvinistic 1980s”; for many years Rosemary Goad was the only woman director, though a string of female staffers—Wilmers, Joanna Mackle, Frances Coady, Fiona McCrae, and many others—made major contributions.)
But the “Cats” windfall couldn’t pay for everything. In a memorandum from June, 1988, Evans wrote, “It is quite clear that we have not achieved our objective of making a profit from publishing, and in addition the full benefit of Cats income is not having the impact it should on our cash flow.” Toby bravely prints an appendix giving F. & F.’s sales and profit history from 1926 to 1990, which demonstrates that even in the “Cats” heyday the company only once achieved a pre-tax profit in excess of five hundred thousand pounds, on sales hovering between seven and nine million pounds. In 1989, the Faber family’s holding company sold half of its shares to Valerie Eliot’s set Copyrights Ltd., as well as a select group of employees; today, Faber & Faber Ltd. is owned equally by Geoffrey Faber Holdings and the T. S. Eliot Trust. After suffering a stroke, in the mid-nineties, McCrum went on to a new career, as a writer. Evans accepted a life peerage and stepped down as chairman, in 2002, to serve as a whip in the House of Lords before becoming an investment banker; he died in 2016. He was succeeded by Stephen Page, the current chief executive. F. & F. briefly had its first female publisher, Mitzi Angel, in the mid-twenty-tens, and is currently enjoying a fresh round of success with new literary stars such as Sally Rooney and Anna Burns, who won the Booker Prize, for “The Milkman,” in 2018, one year after Ishiguro became the thirteenth Faber writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In the thirties, Frank Morley invented a publishing board game; the winner would be “the Publisher who survives longest.” The Faber story certainly speaks volumes about the mix of passion, shrewdness, and luck that it takes to keep such an operation afloat; it also raises the question of who, ultimately, a publishing house like Faber & Faber really belongs to. Is it the stockholders, whose involvement in the day-to-day life of the company is sometimes remote? Is it the staff—publishers, editors, and others—who set the tone and direction during their tenure? Or is it the writers, whose work is the company’s real raison d’être and lifeblood? Faber authors have always had a proprietary feeling about the place, thanks in part, no doubt, to having been welcomed into Eliot’s Club. There’s a kind of poetic justice in the fact that it’s the work, in more than one sense, of T. S. Eliot that both helped establish the temper of the eccentric entity that is Faber & Faber and has kept it alive for close to a century. Toby Faber can be pardoned for betraying a hint of smugness about the company’s ongoing vigor, even if it’s thanks to a musical. Eliot would have been delighted.
Jonathan Galassi is the author of the novel “Muse.”Read more »