Faber & Faber

• 1. Introduction

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  Faber and Faber chose its own name. When Geoffrey Faber dissolved his partnership with the Gwyer family in 1929 and struck out alone, he called the new firm Faber and Faber, despite there being no second Faber anywhere in the picture. The name sounded authoritative, collegial, as though two serious people had agreed on something. In a sense, that invented partnership was a fitting start for a house that would spend the next century gathering the most consequential literary voices of the English-speaking world under one roof. How did an Oxford academic backed by a nursing magazine's profits build one of London's most celebrated publishing houses? And what does it mean that this same firm nearly turned away Lord of the Flies before it became one of the defining novels of the twentieth century?

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• 2. An Unlikely Foundation

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  Sir Maurice and Lady Gwyer owned the Scientific Press, a business that drew much of its income from a weekly magazine called The Nursing Mirror. It was not the most glamorous foundation for a literary enterprise. But the Gwyers wanted to expand into trade publishing, and in 1925 they recruited Geoffrey Faber, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, to help them do it. Together they launched Faber and Gwyer. Four years later, The Nursing Mirror was sold and the partnership dissolved. Faber took the company in a new direction, and in that first season the firm issued T. S. Eliot's Poems 1909-1925. Eliot had been suggested to Faber by the critic Charles Whibley, and he had left Lloyds Bank in London to join as a literary adviser. The early catalogues also carried books by Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, and Vita Sackville-West, among others. The first genuine commercial hit arrived in 1928, when Faber published Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. The book went out anonymously at first; Siegfried Sassoon's name was added only for the second impression. Over the next six months, it was reprinted eight times.

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• 3. Eliot's Reign

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  T. S. Eliot sat on Faber's board from 1929 alongside Richard de la Mare, Charles Stewart, and Frank Vigor Morley, with Geoffrey Faber in the chair. Under Eliot's editorial influence, poetry became the most celebrated part of the firm's list. W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Marianne Moore, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce all appeared in the catalogue. Eliot also published his own literary review, The Criterion, through the house. His judgments were not always celebrated in retrospect. He rejected two manuscripts by George Orwell: A Scullion's Diary, which would eventually become Down and Out in Paris and London, and Animal Farm. The firm's art director during this period was Berthold Wolpe, and the list extended well beyond poetry to take in biographies, memoirs, fiction, children's books, political and religious essays, and art and architecture monographs. During the Second World War, paper shortages pushed profits up sharply, though much of that gain went to taxation.

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• 4. The Postwar List

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  William Golding's Lord of the Flies almost did not appear on the Faber list at all; the firm came close to rejecting it. Instead it was published, and Golding went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, one of thirteen Nobel laureates whose work Faber has published. The postwar decades also brought in Lawrence Durrell, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, P. D. James, Seamus Heaney, Tom Stoppard, and John Osborne. Drama became an increasing priority. Faber's theatre catalogue grew to include plays by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, both of them Nobel Prize winners, alongside Alan Ayckbourn, Alan Bennett, Brian Friel, David Hare, and Timberlake Wertenbaker. When Faber acquired the rights to the remainder of Samuel Beckett's work from the publishing house of John Calder in 2007, it completed a relationship that had begun decades earlier.

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• 5. Editors, Academy, and Digital Ventures

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  In October 2011, Faber announced that Jarvis Cocker, lead singer of Pulp, would join as editor-at-large. The appointment echoed a similar role held by Pete Townshend of The Who in the 1980s. That same spirit of unusual creative recruitment extended into Faber Academy, a creative writing operation launched in 2008. The academy offered courses including Writing a Novel, Advanced Poetry, and Getting Started: Beginners' Fiction, with tutors that at various times included Mike Figgis, Jeanette Winterson, and Tobias Hill. Notable students included the novelist S. J. Watson and the singer-songwriter Katie Melua. From 2018, the academy began awarding two scholarships per year, directed at writers from under-represented groups including writers of colour, disabled writers, and LGBTQ+ writers. That same year, 2008, saw the launch of Faber Finds, an imprint using print-on-demand technology to bring copyrighted out-of-print titles back into circulation. Works rescued through Faber Finds included items from the Mass-Observation archives and titles by John Betjeman, H. G. Wells, and Jan Morris. Faber Digital followed in 2009, producing book-related apps for the iPhone and iPad. One of those apps, The Waste Land for iPad, was Faber's second collaboration with Touch Press; the first, Solar System for iPad, won the Futurebook Award for Digital innovation in 2011. A separate app, Malcolm Tucker: The Missing Phone, received a BAFTA nomination. In 2013, in partnership with Bloomsbury Publishing, Faber Digital launched Drama Online, a subscription platform serving libraries, educators, and researchers.

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• 6. Addresses and Independence

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  For much of its history, Faber operated from Georgian offices at 24 Russell Square in Bloomsbury, London. It later moved to 3 Queen Square, then on the 19th of January 2009 to Bloomsbury House at 74-77 Great Russell Street. In 2023 the firm relocated again, to The Bindery on Hatton Garden. Faber has remained independent throughout. Its American arm, Faber and Faber Inc., was sold in 1998 to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, part of the Holtzbrinck group, where it continued as an imprint focused on arts, entertainment, and popular culture. Faber ended that arrangement in February 2015 and began distributing its books directly in the United States. In 2006, the company was named KPMG Publisher of the Year. With thirteen Nobel laureates across the decades from T. S. Eliot in 1948 to Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017, the house Geoffrey Faber named after a person who did not exist has accumulated a record few publishers anywhere can match.

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