A new letters collection reveals the secret life of the top literary publisher. Here, Faber’s ex-editor-in-chief reflects on his time there, working with writers from Peter Carey to Seamus Heaney

Part of the perennial fascination of the publishing business, for any book lover, is the ringside seat it provides at the creative process. How and why was that book written? What made it such a success/failure? What was its reception? Did reviews make a difference? Following the money: how did it sell? What did it earn? Dip into a publisher’s letters and memos and you get a backstage pass to the sometimes mysterious process that creates literature. Thus the appeal of the Faber correspondence.

In the last century, before the internet and the mobile telephone, such circumstantial traffic was perhaps more comprehensive than ever before. Almost no nuance of the book business went unscrutinised, with documents for every transaction. Faber & Faber, taking its contribution to literature rather more seriously than some, made a particular practice of archiving the paper trail left by every book published under its imprint, first from its offices in Russell Square, London, and then, after the 1960s, at Queen Square on the edge of Bloomsbury.

In the heyday of this correspondence, there’s no mistaking its priceless significance. For better or worse, next to the ancient universities, the BBC, Fleet Street and the metropolitan clubs, Faber was a foundation stone in the edifice that housed a literary tradition. In postwar Britain, it was an influential part of the culture. After the 1970s, everything was about to change. Now that world has almost disappeared.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert McCrum (left) and Matthew Evans (right) flank Sydney Higgins and Tony Benn at a press conference to announce an anthology of socialist writings, Writings on the Wall, that Benn had (nominally) edited. Photograph: Caroline Forbes/Faber & Faber

My battered, burnt-umber copy of Waiting for Godot, price five shillings, tells you all you need to know about Faber in the late 70s. It offers the reader nothing so crass as a blurb: instead, a long quotation from a Times Literary Supplement review (“Mr Samuel Beckett extracts from the idea of boredom the most genuine pathos and enchanting comedy”) and because it’s published by a literary imprint far removed from the hurly-burly of the marketplace, this is not a paperback but a “Faber Paper Covered Edition”. On the back of the book, there’s an impressive list of other Faber playwrights: TS Eliot, Jean Genet, John Osborne and Tom Stoppard. An austere typographical cover projects an aura of avant-garde chic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The architect’s representation of Faber’s new offices in Queen Square. On the back of the same catalogue, a useful map showed how to walk there from the old offices in Russell Square. Photograph: Courtesy of Faber & Faber

Even after a decade of intense social and cultural innovation, from gay liberation to punk rock, the literary ecosystem to which this book belongs remains otherworldly, self-sufficient, eccentric and sui generis. Its ethos is at once distinctive and original. Beckett, the Irishman who wrote in French, the Nobel laureate who appears in Wisden, was a classic Faber writer: remote, reclusive and as rare as a hippogriff. His contemporaries on the Faber list included Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, William Golding and Seamus Heaney. The literary critics John Carey and George Steiner added a whiff of Oxbridge grapeshot. If there were young Turks in the offing, they were newcomers such as Christopher Hampton, David Hare and Paul Muldoon. Incredibly, almost the only female writer on this list was PD James (then in her late 50s).

Deep in the Faber archive were serried volumes of 20th-century Anglo-American poetry and fiction (Auden, Pound, Joyce, Durrell) together with some odd books on nursing and nautical knots, goat husbandry, the history of the potato and titles such as Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay. At times, the Faber office in Queen Square seemed like a cross between a museum and a sanitarium. In-house memos would be addressed to “Mr Monteith” and “Miss Goad”. There were many committees. Inside this literary Vatican, until his death in 1965, TS Eliot was the supreme pontiff. When I joined in 1981, there were still some old hands with memories of “Mr Eliot”.

The letters in this new anthology of the firm’s correspondence – Faber & Faber, edited by the founder’s grandson Toby Faber – recall the formal side of a very formal organisation, a lost world of manuscripts and carbon copies, galley proofs, telexes and Tipp-Ex, a poignant reminder that the book business is still living through the biggest revolution since William Caxton – the age of IT.

We were all Thatcher’s children, young, sleepless and slightly reckless

After 1979, a new generation began to irrupt into the collegiate calm of the London literary scene. Peter Carey, Julian Barnes and William Boyd were being spoken of in the same breath as Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. The Groucho was replacing the Garrick. The first time I met Kazuo Ishiguro, he carried a guitar and a portable typewriter and confessed to feeling divided between short stories and rock music.

The change in the air turned disruptive. There was war (the Falklands), industrial unrest (the miners’ strike) and a bookselling revolution (Waterstones). In hindsight, it was a radical and repressive Tory government that seems inadvertently to have sponsored a literary boom, with new names (Pat Barker, Vikram Seth, Jeanette Winterson and Hanif Kureishi), new imprints (Bloomsbury) and loads of new money (soaring advances). This was also an international phenomenon inspiring a surge in new translations (Mario Vargas Llosa; Danilo Kiš) and new American writers such as Lorrie Moore (Self-Help) and Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping), all of whom were published by Faber during the 1980s.

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By chance, then, Faber was in the midst of all this, making hay while the sun shone. The irrational exuberance of the city was mirrored in headlines: news of book prizes, launch parties and the novelty of literary festivals. We were all Thatcher’s children, young, sleepless and slightly reckless. After one notable literary spree, another editor and I filed our extravagant expenses as “lunch with TS Eliot”, with no retribution from the Faber accounts department. In 1983, when William Goldman published that Hollywood classic, Adventures in the Screen Trade, his mantra “nobody knows anything” seemed to capture perfectly the chaos, energy and irresponsibility of some wild times.

The letters in this collection hint at some of this, but the hectic phone calls and excitement of the moment are frozen in the glacial schedules of office life. Our correspondence normalised a cultural bonanza. We took it for granted that we should be reading a new Pinter play or editing a Kundera translation and arranging to meet Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney. Perhaps only later did we realise how lucky we’d been.