The House of Eliot

Like many a 20th-century publishing house, the fine old firm of Faber & Faber came about almost by accident. The inaugurating Faber — Geoffrey — was an All Souls don in search of a livelihood, who began his career in the post-Great War book trade by investing in the Scientific Press, publishers of the Nursing Mirror. There was trouble with the Gwyer family, owners of the original concern, who resisted the move into general books and disliked the poems of Faber’s brisk young protégé Mr Eliot, but by 1929 the sale of the Mirror for an eye-watering £190,000 (about £5 million at current values), allowed Geoffrey to buy them out and set up on his own.

None of this was accomplished without a struggle, and Toby Faber, the founder’s grandson, quotes some particularly gloomy diary entries from the Gwyer days (‘I feel life is not worth living: the business seems to present insuperable obstacles’.)