The poet and dramatist T. S. Eliot helped make Faber & Faber the home of literary modernism. Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty

A literary publishing house is a strange beast—a business, yes, but also less and more than one. Publishers sometimes develop exalted notions about their cultural status; sometimes these notions become broadly shared. Names like Cape; Einaudi; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Fischer; Gallimard; Grove Press; Knopf; New Directions; Scribner; and the granddaddy of them all, John Murray, Lord Byron’s publisher, are signifiers that once stood for the tastes and aspirations of the men—for they were virtually all men—who founded these institutions. Some have survived for generations, but more often they’ve been absorbed into larger organizations, which, by definition, lack personality.

The persistence of Faber & Faber, which is now celebrating ninety years as an independent publisher, makes for a remarkable case study in this regard, as is demonstrated in “Faber & Faber: The Untold Story,” a new narrative history put together by Toby Faber, the grandson of the firm’s founder, Geoffrey Faber, and a former managing director of the firm. There aren’t many independent publishing houses of Faber’s scale anymore—what might be called small majors. They’ve either resolutely remained small presses, like New Directions or Graywolf or City Lights, or have been bought by bigger firms, as F.S.G. was, by the Holtzbrinck group, of Germany, in 1994. (One American exception is W. W. Norton, which has a strong academic branch and is owned coöperatively by its employees.) What “The Untold Story” makes clear are the ways in which editorial sensibility and independence—renewed and reasserted at key points in the firm’s history—have combined with sheer luck, over the course of nearly a century, to sustain an operation that might very well have gone under more than once.

The story begins when Alsina Gwyer, whose husband was the judge and academic Maurice Gwyer, inherited a share of the Scientific Press from her father. The primary source of profit for the Scientific Press was a magazine aimed at nurses called The Nursing Mirror. Alsina and Maurice, who was a fellow at All Souls, the storied graduate college at Oxford, wished to diversify the press’s offerings. Maurice enlisted Geoffrey Faber, an unsuccessful brewer and sometime poet and novelist in his thirties whose “most distinguished achievement” to date, Toby writes, was probably that he himself had won an All Souls fellowship. Faber proposed adding “legal cram books,” foreign fiction, and a literary magazine. At the All Souls high table one day, Faber described his plans to the journalist Charles Whibley, who suggested that the company acquire a magazine he had written for, The Criterion, which had been founded, just a few years before, by T. S. Eliot. In April, 1925, Eliot joined the firm, renamed Faber & Gwyer, as a director, with the understanding that it would publish his magazine and his books.

Alfred Harcourt, a leading American publisher of the time, whose writers included Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, pooh-poohed Faber & Gwyer as “a bunch of Oxford amateurs; won’t last.” After a series of struggles between Faber and the Gwyers over the direction of the company, The Nursing Mirror was sold, in 1929, and the Gwyers were bought out. Faber offered to rename the enterprise Faber & Morley—after Frank Morley, an American who played a crucial role in the company’s early development, and would later go to work for Harcourt. But, in a rare flourish of wit, Faber instead named himself as his own partner. (There was only ever one Faber at Faber & Faber.) Geoffrey Faber was a straightforward, conventional, occasionally irritable but fundamentally decent soul whose diary, as quoted by Toby, reveals an endearing self-doubt. “It is hard to describe him as a great publisher with a brilliant editorial eye,” Toby writes, “but he had an instinctive understanding of finance and, even more, knew how to get the best from his fellow directors.” Morley later observed that “Faber’s style was his team.” He deliberated shrewdly in choosing his colleagues, whom he then gave his full trust.

The key figure to whom he gave this trust was Eliot—who, as agreed, gave Faber his books, starting with “Poems 1909-1925.” Eliot brought in his friends, too, including Ezra Pound and James Joyce. (In America, Pound got his disciple James Laughlin to start New Directions in order to publish his work; the fountainheads of modernism thus were responsible for both a revolution in letters and the vehicles for its promotion.) Afraid of prosecution for obscenity, Faber & Faber passed on “Ulysses,” but it published individual sections of Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” and then issued it in toto as “Finnegans Wake,” in 1939.

Faber & Faber’s board of directors discuss how best to use their paper ration, in 1944. Photograph by Felix Man and Kurt Hutton / Picture Post / Getty

With new writers, Eliot tended to express interest early but was slow to make a commitment. Gradually, though, he started to bring younger poets onto the Faber list, even if not all of them were destined for immortality. In the autumn of 1930, Faber & Faber offered not only W. H. Auden’s “Poems” but P. P. Graves’s “The Pursuit” and “The Ecliptic,” by Joseph Gordon MacLeod. In one of the more illuminating letters quoted in “The Untold Story,” Eliot explains his reasons for rejecting the “sound, earnest and educated verse” of a manuscript that the house was considering. “I think it would be a better policy for F. & F. to make a bad blunder in publishing the wrong poet,” he writes, “than to blur their reputation by publishing too many respectable ones.”

“I am not sure that Eliot’s best qualification to become a publisher wasn’t the fact that he had worked in a Bank,” Morley wrote, years later. In the thirties, according to Morley, Eliot was reading more manuscripts than anyone else at Faber, writing reader’s reports (“on Eliot was dumped anything or anybody particularly difficult”), jacket copy, and thousands of letters. He had a sharp eye for business, too. In a tribute to the firm published a decade ago, Matthew Evans, the chairman of Faber & Faber in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, described an angry letter that Eliot wrote to Faber in the late forties, which is not quoted in Toby’s book. The gist of it was that “it was OK to publish good books, but that it was necessary to publicise and sell the books,” too.

Eliot’s first best-seller was “Who Moved the Stone?,” by Frank Morison, “a considered and well-written discussion of the Resurrection,” which was published in 1930. He rejected George Orwell twice: “Down and Out in Paris and London,” in 1932 (“decidedly too short … and too loosely constructed”), and “Animal Farm,” in 1944 (“we have no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the present time”). By the mid-thirties, F. & F. had become one of London’s leading publishers. “The stamp of acceptance by Eliot came to have more and more significance,” Toby writes. “His reputation fed those of the poets he took on, and theirs fed his as a publisher, so that Faber became the home of literary Modernism.” Indeed, poetry was always at the heart of Eliot’s interest as critic and editor, and it became crucial to Faber & Faber’s identity. After Auden, Eliot took on Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice, and in 1934 proposed a book to Marianne Moore.