FABER & FABER

THE MODERN LIBRARY

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.

AND T.S.ELIOT

Although 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.

It was Faber who conceived of packaging poems as an alternative to Christmas cards – the Ariel Poems. Publicity for these described them as:

‘…series of little booklets consisting of single previously unpublished poems each suitably decorated in the gayest wrappings…designed to take the place of Christmas cards and other similar tokens that one sends for remembrance sake at certain seasons of the year.’

The first series of the Ariel Poems ran to thirty eight titles and de la Mare was soon gathering together artists to provide both covers and illustrations for them, including John and Paul Nash, Barnett Freedman, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Graham Sutherland – and Kauffer. The little eight page booklets were finely printed at the Curwen Press. Kauffer was to design four of Eliot’s – Journey of the Magi (1927), A Song for Simeon (1928), Marina (1930) and Triumphal March (1931). Herbert Simon, of the Curwen Press wrote of Kauffer’s relationship with the Press, that he was ‘quick to recognize Harold Curwen’s judgement as interpreter of design. De la Mare is reported to have told Kauffer of one of his designs:

‘I was not sure about it at first but it certainly grows on me.’

This could well have been about Kauffer’s first offering – Journey of the Magi – for at first glance it is problematic and only by more careful perusal can one pick out the three kings, the star, and so on, one of the kings appearing to be wearing a bowler hat. Marina is again complex with a Picassoesque split head, whereas Triumphal March has a more obvious image. Paul Nash is said to have disliked the yellow cover he had been allotted and it would seem that Kauffer obligingly accepted it without ado, for his Journey of the Magi. D.H.Lawrence was generally critical of the art work for the poems but grudgingly admitted that he did not mind Kauffer’s ‘futuristic’ efforts. Although de la Mare courted artists for the Ariel Poems he does not seem to have seen illustrated covers as a major selling ploy for Faber & Faber. He wrote:

How much better might this mint of money, that is emptied on these ephemeral wrappers – little works of art that many of them may be – be spent upon improving the quality of the materials which are used in the making of the book itself.’

It is, perhaps, curious that Kauffer did not do more work for Faber & Faber, apart from a photomontage for Herbert

Read’s Art Now in 1933, given how close he had become to

Eliot (both Americans, they called each other ‘Missouri’ and ‘Montana’, after the states of their births). The book caused something of a stir not so much for its cover but because it was one of the first books to be printed wholly in sans serif type.

Kauffer’s return to America in 1940 would obviously been a factor, but by then Berthold Wolpe had become the Faber’s favoured jacket designer.

Kauffer’s absence may also have been due to internal politics or to the fact that Eliot was not particularly visual or in favour of his poetry being illustrated. He once wrote to Kauffer ‘yours is the only kind of decoration I can endure’. From this one might deduce that Eliot would have been well-pleased with Kauffer’s near Puritan cover for the Harcourt Brace limited edition of Four Quartets in 1943 – entirely typographical with three simple colour bands each bearing one word – ‘Four’, ‘Quartets’, ‘T.S.Eliot’. Kauffer again resorted to typography for another

Harcourt Brace book, this time with Eliot having written the text – From Poe to Valery where the title is in green and white, along with Eliot’s name, linked by a swirling line against an all-black background.

Above: Four Quartets, T.S.Eliot, 1943, published by Harcourt Brace.