On Friday 14 May the Faber archive, based at the company’s new home on Great Russell Street, opened its doors to the public for the very first time, as part of an exclusive competition with Museums at Night and Culture24.

Robert Brown, archivist

The winners, chosen at random, were Anna Tuckett, Claire King, Helen Cox, Josie Kehoe, Simon Quicke and Victoria Linde – a fantastic group of book lovers and Faber enthusiasts!

Faber’s archivist, Robert Brown began the evening with a virtual tour of Faber’s original office on Russell Square. Along the way, we were introduced to Morgan (the original Faber cat), watched Geoffrey Faber chair a boardroom meeting in a film from 1951, and saw T. S. Eliot’s office in a series of photographs taken on the day he died.

Robert then uncovered key items from the Faber treasure chest, including Eliot’s first letter to a young W. H. Auden, an early drawing of  Old Possum and an amusing postcard sent by Philip Larkin whilst he was on holiday. Amongst the book reports and other Faber riches, Robert told the winners unknown stories from Faber’s history – from fire watching in Bloomsbury during the Blitz to recovering William Golding’s Lord of the Flies from the rejection pile.

Faber New Poets Joe Dunthorne and Heather Phillipson ended the evening with a wonderful poetry reading. Alongside a selection of their own poetry, they read a range of other Faber poets such as Charles Simic, John Berryman, Simon Armitage and Don Paterson.

Read some of the winner’s blogs:

Foxyhlc | Backwards in Heels | Inside Books

For more information on the Faber archive visit our website and to discover more about Faber’s design history visit the Faber flickr site.

Around the Archive table

2009 marked Faber and Faber’s 80th anniversary and throughout the year Faber staff were encouraged to spend an hour or so in the Archive, pick out three books, and explain their choices. For some it was like being a kid in a sweet shop; others knew exactly what to choose. The books selected, which we’ll post up as we go along, span all sorts of genres (cookery, children’s classics, modernist design, photography, and even medical textbooks – types of books that many might not have expected from Faber). The choices of books say a lot about Faber and its history, but also a lot about the people selecting them …

Faber’s London (and beyond) Account Manager Jeremy Wood picks his three favourites from the Archive:

Larkin at Sixty edited by Anthony Thwaite (1982)

Larkin at Sixty

An obvious choice of author and a fairly recent publication (1982), Larkin provided my formative Faber moment, when I purchased his Collected Poems back in 1988, so had to be included here.

This collection gathers together the prose and poem tributes of twenty of Larkin’s fellow writers, who celebrate the man and the poet on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1982, just three years before he died. The contributors include Kingsley Amis, Andrew Motion, Alan Bennett, Seamus Heaney and Clive James.

The pieces here range from examinations of his professional life as a librarian; his jazz writings; his editing of the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse; and an examination of the relationship between his poetry and his fiction.

It would be great to see it made available again in some form, (retitled Larkin Recalled?) to coincide with Anthony Thwaite’s forthcoming selection of Larkin’s correspondence with his long-term lover, Monica Jones, and to mark the 25th anniversary of Larkin’s death in 2010.

The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell (1945)

The Folded Leaf

I had no idea that Faber had ever published Maxwell until I stumbled upon this in the archive. A celebrated editor of The New Yorker magazine, Maxwell helped shape the literary careers of John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, John Cheever and Eudora Welty, amongst others.

Whilst being an influential editor, his understated stories and novels have not earned him the recognition or appreciation he deserves. The Folded Leaf, Maxwell’s third novel, was published in 1945 to widespread praise.

It is a sensitive coming-of-age tale, an autobiographical study recollecting boyhood triumph and tragedy set in an all-boys college in the Chicago suburbs of the 1920s.

Stanley Spencer at War by Richard Carline (1978)

Stanley Spencer at War

Spencer was one of the leading British painters of the two world wars, from a generation of talented war artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. Carline, himself an artist, whose sister, Hilda, Spencer went on to marry, first met Spencer in 1915.

First published by Faber in 1978, Carline’s study draws on Spencer’s letters; his numerous notebooks; and Spencer’s reminiscences of his war experiences.

Although brief, Carline’s biography provides a detailed account of Spencer’s first twenty years of adult life, taking in his pre-war days and charting the rise to prominence of a major artist. Spencer saw active service in Macedonia in WWI. His war experiences became the subject of his first important commissions, his paintings of social realism bringing home the consequences of battle.