FABER & FABER AND T.S.ELIOT
A
lthough Kauffer would have known of the poet and Faber & Faber director T.S.Eliot when they were both members of the Council of the Arts League just after the end of WWI, and he had illustrated one of Eliot’s poems for two of Harold Munro’s Chapbook magazines, their close friendship really developed when Kauffer began designing covers for Faber & Faber in the late 1920s. In 1925, Geoffrey Faber, a would-be poet and author, rejected a position in his father’s brewery to join Lady Gwyer, whose father had left her a publishing house specializing in scientific subjects. Kauffer is recorded as designing covers for publications under the name Faber & Gwyer including for Ray Strachey’s Shaken by the Wind. The Strachey commission may possibly have come via Lytton Strachey or Virginia Woolf as he was related to both by marriage By 1929 the firm had become Faber & Faber (albeit there was only ever one Faber), and its subject matter had moved over to literature. Faber was joined by T.S.Eliot, who had fled banking for publishing, and who was to be a director of the company for some forty years. Soon Faber and Eliot were joined by Richard de la Mare, the son of the poet Walter, who was to become the firm’s production director with a particular interest in, and skill for, selecting suitable artists and designers for its books.
Opposite and above: Art Now, 1933, by Herbert Read. The first edition in blue and second edition in red. The book was much criticised for being set in ‘unreadable’ sans serif type. 45
