Faber & Faber

It takes a village to launch an author!

Over the last 20+ years, I've been making enough marmalade to satisfy a rapacious family and have an inexhaustible supply of 'makes and acceptable gift' for friends, relations and random visitors. The modal response from the latter group is a) thank you very much that was excellent and b) you should go into business selling it. Errm, No! Spending a couple of days squeeezing pectin from pulp and getting spattered by boiling marmalade is my wheelhouse. Standing in the drizzle at a farmer's market for €4 a pot, not so much. When you buy marmalade in Tesco, it is the work of dozens of human hands:  glass-blowers, lid-stampers, fruit-pickers, sugar-refiners, bottlers, boxers, truck-drivers, shelf-stackers. And a pyramid of gangers, QC, marketeers, designers, managers all the way up to Gerry Murphy, the Tesco Chair.

Same in publishing. There are far more authors than there are financially secure authors, and far more writers than there are [published] authors. After writing 500-800 word chunks for the internet since 1996, I've clocked up 2.5 million coherent words. It's never going to become a 60,000 word book, between covers, on  a shelf, because I am essentially a butterfly without the bottle to decide which 98% of it to leave on the cutting room floor. That ruthless copy-editing is part of the work that publishers do.

I'm currently reading Faber & Faber the untold story (2021) by Toby "3rd Gen" Faber. Their Spring 1930 Catalog offered James Joyce's Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert. At the time Ulysses itself was banned in the UK " . . . Even therefore if the original were published in England, Mr Gilbert's exposition would be valuable. As things stand it is invaluable". f&f did, eventually, pull enough teeth from James Joyce to publish Finnegan's Wake in 1939. Another coup was publishing Laurence Durrell's amazing Alexandria Quartet, which I must get round to re-reading as part of my 2026 Leventine book-fest. Also his Bitter Lemons.

C.P. "Two Cultures" Snow and Gerald Durrell [egotistical younger brother of Laurence] were discovered and launched by f&f but left for green[back]er pastures after their initial promotion and best-seller success. There was a certain amount of wounded hauteur at Faber at this lack of loyalty from these authors but their shift tracked the arrival of Literary Agents as go-betweens in the publishing world. There is no reason why a writer would have the toolkit to drive a hard bargain to turn their fruit of their labour into shoes for their own children. No more than a scientist should be able to manage a $million grant or competently HR a team of 10 effectives. Agents get a bigger slice of the pie (and their 10% on top) for authors but that slice deprives secretaries, copy-editors, typographers, designers, cover artists of their Christmas bonus or indeed their jobs; as publishers are forced to trim their sails. Read the acknowledgments of any recent book to see how many people are involved in the process. Yes, even ebooks and earbooks need work between the author's typescript and your eyes/ears.

Despite being written as a scrap-book of letters, memos and minutes gleaned from the archives with minimal narrative links, Toby Faber's book comes through as a gripping yarn. IF you can skate over the pervasive background of entitlement and snobbery. Having been refused an extension of their overdraft by the manager of their NatWest branch, one of Team Faber had lunch with fellow Old Boy NatWest Chairman to re-open the vaults.

T.S. Eliot, f&f Director, on potential new hire (and TSE's eventual replacement / successor) Charles Montieth: I am inclined to take seriously John S[parrow]'s remark that C.M. has flair rather than taste . . . C.M. is, no doubt, a plebian; but on the basis of one interview it would not occur to me to call him 'common'; and (which is the most important), I would be surprised to hear anyone designate him as 'vulgar'. Gah! This Pleb had a double-first from Oxford, was a wounded WWII veteran (Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers), and [like Geoffrey 'Founder' Faber], a Fellow of All Soul's Oxford [DIB for deets]. He went on to scoop for Faber: Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern [and that's just the Irish]. 2x Heaney's and 2x McGahern's in my pic above L where also Spufford.

TS Eliot didn't win his 1948 Nobel Prize [“for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”] for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) but the latter made him (and Faber) fabulously wealthy after Andrew Lloyd Webber conjured his musical Cats from those children's poems. Indeed f&f would have gone bust in the 1980s without the Cats royalty cheques.