Toby Faber tells the Untold Story of Faber & Faber

Toby Faber grew up with Faber & Faber - its books and stories have played an important role in his life. He was the company's managing director for four years and remains a non-executive director and chairman of sister company Faber Music. He has written two celebrated works of non-fiction, Stradivarius and Fabergé 's Eggs. His first novel, Close to the Edge, was published by Muswell Press in 2019. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters.    We met via Zoom to talk about his book Faber & Faber: The Untold Story. Toby tells the story in the words of those who founded and worked for the company during the 20th century. One of founder Geoffrey Faber (Toby's grandfather)'s great strengths, he says, was recruitment. ​Toby provides me with verbal sketches of many of those recruited to the firm, including T.S. Eliot, Morley Kennerley, Frank Morley, Richard de la Mare, Charles Monteith, Robert McCrum and others.    In addition to tracing the history of Faber we look at some of the reasons why it continues to thrive as an independent company, including the fact that, years ago, it chose to maintain control of publishing its own paperback editions of backlist titles.