Copy That: Faber's House Style and its Quirks
By Anne Owen, Managing Editor, 22 April 2026
House style is as much about achieving seamless legibility as it is about asserting brand identity.
This may seem contradictory: on the one hand, style choices should not draw undue attention or distract from the sense and substance of a text; on the other, they should adhere to brand values. As in all things, it’s a balancing act!
It was after careful deliberation, then, that Faber recently took the onerous decision to drop the full point before a closing quotation mark in all review quotes that are displayed on new book covers, in the prelims pages of paperback editions and in all Faber marketing and publicity materials. A tiny change, you might think, but one that affects hundreds of pieces of copy generated by Faber staff every year. The key motivation for the change is to achieve a less cluttered impression in our copy with a style that is cleaner, more modern. Many other publishers, we noted, have adopted this style.
The foundation of Faber’s house style is the Oxford style guide. New Hart’s Rules and the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors are our go-to references when it comes to the minutiae of whether to italicise, say, ‘carte blanche’ (we don’t) or to capitalise ‘communist’ (we don’t, with exceptions) or to hyphenate ‘bestseller’ (no, we don’t do that either, but more on this below).
We can, of course, be far more rigid in the application of house style to the copy Faber generates in house, be that jacket copy, press releases or newsletters to Faber Members. When it comes to an author’s work, however, we must be far more flexible. The conscious style choices of our authors are always respected and preserved; for example, Sally Rooney chooses not to enclose direct speech within speech marks in her novels.
Although the Faber style guide for copy-editors and proofreaders runs to twenty-four pages, it is based to a great extent on widely accepted editorial style conventions that are not peculiar to Faber.
And while they are referred to as ‘house rules’, they are set out mainly as preferences and serve as a guide only. Every typescript is different and requires a pragmatic approach. Take alternative spellings, for example: Faber’s house style preference is for ‘-ise’ spellings over ‘-ize’ (e.g. ‘organise’ not ‘organize’; ‘realise’ not ‘realize’). However, when presented with a 120,000-word typescript that has predominantly ‘-ize’ spellings, we would choose the path of least resistance and retain that style, checking for any lapses in consistency. Choosing to rigidly impose our preferred style would involve much additional time and effort, and might actually introduce errors where none had existed. Consistency is king (not King!), and we rely greatly on the skills of our copy-editors and proofreaders to check for and apply consistent styles throughout a work.
Language use and forms are, of course, subject to myriad cultural and political influences and change organically over time.
As such, any adaptations to house style are implemented in the same way: as and when needed to reflect current use.
Following the emergence of Indigenous rights movements around the world in the 1970s, the word ‘Indigenous’ with a capital ‘i’ was adopted by Aboriginal leaders as a way to identify and unite their communities, and to represent them in political arenas as autonomous, self-sustaining societies that have faced discrimination, marginalisation and assimilation of their cultures and peoples due to the arrival of a larger or more dominant settler population. The capitalisation of the initial letter ‘i’ serves to assert this collective identity as well as parity with other populations, e.g. European.
Technology, unsurprisingly, is an area where words and forms have changed rapidly and will continue to do so. A few of us may still remember the days when ‘in-box’, ‘e-mail’ and ‘e-book’ were accepted styles, but the hyphens are now long gone, leaving each a neat compound noun.
As publishers, a word we are naturally keen to include in copy whenever legitimately possible is ‘bestseller’: the noun ‘seller’ is hitched to the adjective ‘best’ to form a compound noun that means a product that has sold in high numbers. It would once have been written as two words but with increased usage acquired a hyphen, which was eventually squeezed out for ease of presentation.
Some forms are more stubborn: in UK English, we cling to the convention that ‘blond’ is the correct spelling when referring to a man or boy and ‘blonde’ when referring to a woman or girl, following the original French masculine and feminine noun forms. This distinction now seems fussy and archaic in an era when gender identity is fluid. Our friends over the pond have adopted ‘blond’ as standard; no doubt we will one day follow suit.
A recent and, in some quarters, unwelcome trend from over said pond is the use of ‘two times’ (or worse, ‘two-time’) as an adjective, often in the context of prizes won, instead of the perfectly concise and really quite elegant ‘twice’.
Which brings us back to the original point: the overriding purpose of Faber house style – any house style, for that matter – is to apply forms that are consistent, clear and concise to the point where they will not be noticed: to facilitate a seamless reading experience and not to encumber it. Copy that!
About the author
Anne Owen has worked in publishing for thirty-five years and at Faber since 2006. She has been Managing Editor since 2012.