The New Yorker's Deep Dive Into the History of Faber & Faber

At the New Yorker, Jonathan Galassi provides readers with a thumbnail history of the Faber & Faber publishing house, as laid out in Toby Faber's Faber & Faber: The Untold Story. Galassi begins with some publishing context before moving on to tracing the firm's founding and early years:

A literary 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.

Read on to find out how a brewer went on to help establish the U.K.'s most august literary publisher.