Spectator Books: would Faber & Faber still exist without T.S. Eliot?

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2019

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

This year the publishers Faber & Faber celebrate their 90th birthday, and to honour the occasion Sam is joined by Toby Faber, the founder’s grandson and the author of a new history of the company called Faber & Faber: The Untold Story. Most corporate histories are boring, but this one — told largely through the correspondence of that company’s astonishing cast of literary luminaries — is anything but. Toby talks about the company’s rackety start as a publisher of medical textbooks; about T.S. Eliot and the genesis of Cats; and Kazuo Ishiguro’s most mortifying moment.

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:11.1	And this week, we're going to be talking about the history of Faber and Faber. I'm joined by Toby Faber,
0:16.8	who's the grandson of the firm's founder, Jeffrey Faber, and his book is called Faber and Faber the
0:21.9	Untold Story. And we don't, well, we don't play favourites with publishers and the spectator's
0:26.0	books pages, but the history of Faber has a definite place in everyone's heart. There's
0:31.3	quoted in Toby's book is a 1934 letter from T.S. Eliot to Ezra Pound, where he says, if you were the sort of guy
0:39.0	whatever admitted anything, you would admit that Faber and Faber are good publishers, which seems
0:44.3	a reasonable starting point. Toby, what's the occasion of you putting this book together?
0:48.6	The occasion of being this book together was essentially overcoming my reluctance to do so.
0:53.7	People have talked for a long
0:54.8	time about doing a history of Faber and Faber, and we've always resisted it because we are
1:00.4	publishers at heart and no publisher wants to publish a boring book, and corporate histories
1:05.7	have a reputation for being very boring. It deserved reputation, I'd say, but this one... I'd like to think that I will crack that reputation.
1:12.8	Well, this one is not boring, but you've done it differently.
1:15.4	I've done it differently because I suddenly realized essentially that you could tell the story of
1:18.4	Faber and Faber, not in my words as a historian looking back on the story of Faber and Faber,
1:23.9	but instead in the words of the people living it at the time. So using the Faber archive, you've just, for example, quoted an extract from a letter there,
1:32.4	using extracts from letters very tightly drawn, so not complete letters generally,
1:36.4	extracts from letters, board memos, diary entries, stringing them all together to make the narrative out of them,
1:43.0	out of the words of the
1:45.1	people who didn't know that Faber and Faber was going to live until it was 90 and become a leading
1:49.7	literary publisher. Yeah, he's better go through and picked up the plums. Well, I've had a lot of
	...

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