Hello I am Toby Faber, I am the author of Faber & Faber: The Untold Story and I'm
here to welcome you to the Faber archive where I'm going to show you some of the
treasures that we have here. And so I'll start off actually by showing you the table.
Because this table, this octagonal oak table is the table at which my
grandfather, who founded Faber & Faber, used to chair the book committee that
met every Wednesday and still essentially meets every Wednesday. And I
should also point out that we are being overlooked by the Epstein bust of
T.S. Eliot, who was almost my grandfather's first
recruit. So the first book of course I should show you is the first book that
Faber ever published: Spain In A Two-Seater. You soon see things moving on
in terms of the design and the artistic quality of the books because another one
of my grandfather's recruits and another really important first recruit was
Richard de la Mare. So one of the first things that Richard de le Mare did for
example and this was I think his own idea was to issue first editions of poems,
each with their own little pamphlet like that, they were called the Ariel Poems,
about half a dozen of them came out every Christmas. Interesting idea in
itself to publish poetry like this, they came with their own envelope,
you bought instead of a Christmas card essentially. And it would've been a lovely
Christmas card to send somebody because not only did it have a poem, generally on
a Christmas theme, each also came with their own original artwork.
Edward Borden illustrated Popular Song by Edith Sitwell, here with this rather
lovely, bucolic scene. Edward Borden would still be doing
covers for Faber right up until the 1970s. Its First bestseller, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.
Again I have to say the credit for this must go to Richard de la Mare.
Siegried Sassoon was a friend of the de la Mares.
met Richard de la Mare at his father's house in the summer of
1928, said I'm writing a book about fox hunting what do you think? Richard de la Mare
said yes please. It arrived in installments and we published
it very quickly in autumn 1928 and it was an immediate bestseller. So you're
still not really getting anything very exciting in terms of the covers and
Faber and Gwyer. And so what I like to do is I like to contrast that with its
sequel that now comes out under the Faber and faber livery
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. You're seeing a lovely Barnett
Friedman cover here. Auto-lithograph is carved on stone with this hand-drawn
lettering that you see here. And it's almost as though once Faber and
Faber takes over from Faber and Gwyer - and probably at this point I should say
there only ever was one Faber, my grandfather, just sounds grander than
plain Faber. There are many stories about how he came
up with the name but I think most people's favorite is that it was Walter
de la Mare, so Richard's father, who said 'You can't have too much of a good thing,
why not call it Faber and Faber.' But anyway it became Faber and Faber in 1929
and all of a sudden you really do start to see the creative juices starting to
flow. During the war we have a new cover designer arrives at Faber: Bertold Volpe.
he wasn't just a brilliant designer he was in particular a brilliant
typographer. He designed a number of the great typefaces that are still in use today
most famously his Albertus typeface which he would use so much on
Faber books that people started to call it the Faber typeface. We see the
Albertus typeface on For The Union Dead by Robert Lowell. Just an absolutely
classic Volpe cover. After the second world war that you see Faber frankly
with its first generation of publishers getting older needing to renew itself.
Eliot was brilliant in many things, one of the ways in which he was brilliant
was in seeing that. And there's a lovely exchange of letters in which he
writes to my grandfather saying essentially you and I aren't getting any
younger we have to find some new young blood to come into the firm. And I think
if my grandfather had a particular brilliance it was that he was a
brilliant recruiter. He'd obviously recruited all these great people for the
first generation of the firm and he went on to do it again for a second
generation of people arriving at Faber, most famously Charles Monteith. And I
thought I would just show you the most famous of Charles Monteith's discoveries
which happened I think practically within a week of his arrival at Faber.
So he'd arrived at Faber as a new young editor on a year's
probation and he came across one particular letter. It was as I say it was
attached to a very dog-eared manuscript that had clearly been around a lot of
other publishers already and been rejected by them and this is what the
letter says: Dear sir, I send you the typescript of my
novel, Strangers From Within which might be defined as an allegorical
interpretation of a stock situation.' I think it's fair to say that's not a
selling cover letter and indeed the manuscript that Charles Monteith picked
up had already been read by the Faber reader and she's written her comments
here across the top of the letter: 'Time: the future. Absurd
and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb in the
colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish
and dull. Pointless.' And there's a big 'R' for reject at the end of it. Well, Charles
read beyond that rather rubbish and dull first chapter, got into something behind
it he thought was much more interesting and I suppose I should tell you what the
book was that resulted by telling you the ending of the letter. 'I hope you will
feel able to publish it, yours faithfully William Golding.' It was indeed Lord of
the Flies. So that was in 1953. Here's a memo that Charles Monteith wrote
in 1957, that's his red typewriting there. And what he's talking about in
this memo is a book of poetry that's come in from a young poet he hasn't
heard of before but it's won a poetry prize in America. He thinks the book of
poems is very uneven but perhaps Mr. Eliot could take a look at it. You can
see it's addressed to Mr. Eliot at the top there in a rather wonderfully formal
way. Perhaps Mr. Eliot could take a look at it and, if he agrees, send this young
poet a letter of encouragement. What does Eliot say? Well there again,
this is his handwriting in the pencil across the bottom of again this is another
great foundation document: 'I'm inclined to think we ought to take this man now.
Let's discuss him. TSE.' And the man they're talking about is
Ted Hughes, they are talking about Ted Hughes's first book. Robert McCrum
arrives in 1979 and starts to revive Faber's fiction list and so here I have
the first letter from Kazuo Ishiguro sent to Faber and Faber. It starts Dear Mr. McCrum –
they became Robert and Ish very soon after that – I was told recently by
Malcolm Bradbury that you had contacted him in connection with a new Faber collection.
I just love it, at the end he says... so he
sent him his short stories, he says 'PS I enclose stamped
addressed envelope.' Just in case you want to send it back. And Robert, it's just
it's like things a generation before with TS Eliot and Charles Monteith, at
the bottom of the letter 'I vote for these. R McC.' And at this time as
well in the 1980s we are going through another design revolution actually and
we go to an external design agency called Pentagram. And Pentagram actually
take responsibility for our covers for a while. They come up with the FF logo that
is now a familiar part of the Faber branding. Two last books where you
see the other aspect of what Pentagram did for the more mainstream books.
The idea of a box. A box where you put all the information about the book. A very
flexible design concept because you can put that box anywhere you like on the
cover but also very strong branding and here you are seeing the Pentagram box on
the Booker Prize winner in 1988, Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda. Here you are
seeing it again on the Booker Prize winner in 1989, Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains
of the Day. I've been sitting at this table for the last couple of years looking
through files, trying to build up from those files the story of how Faber and
Faber became what it is and I start off by going through management files
actually. And here's a management file calledSales manager 1929 to 1934. I'm
just going through this file and all of a sudden I come across a letter from TS
Eliot that had never been found before, never seen before.
It starts 'My dear Jeffrey...' of course. It's from the 4th of August 1933. And then I
turn it over and this is how the letter closes. And what it closes with is
with a poem. As far as I know by TS Eliot, as far as I know a poem that has never
been published before. So this is the exclusive!
My vocations are Tedious and Trivial;
My Manners are Mild and Entrancing; My Tastes are Compact and Convivial:
(1) Eating (2) Drinking (3) Dancing.