Faber & Faber

Faber and Faber was founded by Geoffrey Faber in 1929, with T. S. Eliot as editor, and scored an immediate bestseller with the (then anonymous) Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. And now we are looking back on eighty years of independence and celebrating with a special anniversary publishing programme.

We’re launching our celebrations this May with the Faber Firsts, a series of ten republished paperbacks of great Faber debut novels, including The Bell Jar, Lord of the Flies and The New York Trilogy styled by contemporary designers to match classic eras of our design history.

Also in May we’re issuing six beautiful hardback Poetry Classics by Auden, Eliot, Hughes, Plath, Betjeman and Yeats. The selections have been made by great writers, and each one has a stunning cover and matching endpapers by a contemporary printmaker.

A landmark publishing project comes to fruition in May too. For the first time, all of Samuel Beckett’s work will be published by Faber in newly edited editions, with introductions and notes from leading Beckett scholars. The first batch of Becketts includes two novels, Watt and Murphy, and the last four prose fictions he wrote (Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Sitirrings Still), a book which includes his famous injunction to ‘Try again, fail again. Fail better.’ These are published alongside a number of his best known plays, from Endgame to Krapp’s Last Tape.

June sees the publication of Faber and Faber: Eighty Years of Book Cover Design. This is the story of the designers, artists and authors at the heart of Faber’s eighty year design story. From its beginnings in the 1920s and 1930s on to the classic years of innovation under Berthold Wolpe after the war, and from the celebrated period of collaboration with Pentagram on to the modern day, here is a lavish celebration of the art and beauty of book design.

And it’s not just Faber’s birthday we’re marking. Seamus Heaney was seventy at Easter and together with RTE we are releasing his complete works on audio, read by the great man himself, and a boxed set of all of his individual poetry collections too.

A new selection of Stephen Spender’s poetry celebrates the centenary of his birth. And an updated edition of Harold Pinter’s prose collection Various Voices, which now includes his Nobel lecture, has been published to commemorate his death in 2008.

Coming soon there’s a new reading of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets by Ralph Fiennes, and later in the year a unique collaboration between Faber and the Arts Council means we’ll be publishing the first in a series of pamphlets launching the careers of a new generation of exciting voices in poetry.

And then to round off 2009 we have John Carey’s long-awaited biography of William Golding, the author famously rescued from the slush pile at Faber by editor Charles Montieth. This biography by acclaimed critic Carey charts Golding’s journey from provincial school teacher to worldwide literary icon. Lord of the Flies has become one of the most celebrated books published by Faber in its history: an international phenomenon from its publication in 1954. Golding’s writing career was to include a Booker Prize win for his 1980 novel Rites of Passage and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983.

And then we end the year with a delightful new edition of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, illustrated by Axel Scheffler. This enduring children’s classic was first published in 1939 and the new publication will feature many charming drawings by Axel Scheffler, author of The Gruffalo.

Alongside all of these anniversary publications Faber and Faber will be striving as ever to publish the best in new writing. All in all it’s a rather busy year for an octagenarian!