Faber Firsts

At the heart of the process of choosing who to publish is, obviously, editorial taste, but it’s difficult to pin down exactly how we choose. It’s a hard thing to make scientific because so much of it is based on intuition, gut feeling and passion. The editor has to really want the writer and the book for something to come out of it ... In a literary business like ours, you find that success comes at strange moments for strange reasons. If you land a book at the wrong moment and the audience doesn’t turn up when you expect them to, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t be a success in the end. You never take on a book without believing that you can create success. When you invest heavily in editorial taste, like we do, you just have to believe in your taste and keep going.

Stephen Page CEO of publishers Faber & Faber is interviewed by Rouwen Lim in Starmag about how the company's amazing track record (which six Booker Prize winners and 11 Nobel Laureatesso consistently over the decades).

(But is Faber trading on past glories? That's an interesting question Sam Jordison asked on The Guardian blog back in May.)

F&F have just celebrated their 80th anniversary and are republishing 10 novels by some of their finest writers as part of the Faber Firsts series. The cover designers share the stories behind their iconic images. These are truly beautiful retro-looking editions and I want them so much!

P-O-D Classics!

The new technology meets the classic!

Faber have announced a new imprint, Faber Finds, which aims to restore to print some of the classics of the past which have gone out of print and for which mainstream offset printing wouldn't be a viable option because the demand just wouldn't be great enough ... and they're using print-on-demand technology and selling online rather than through bookshops.

Guy Dammann in the Guardian examines the far-reaching implications of Faber's move.

The biggest one of course, that no book need ever go out of print again.

Faber Firsts kicks off with an initial list of 100 titles assembled an impressive line up of authors and editors, and includes :

Jacob Bronowski, one of the greatest polymaths of the twentieth century, the centenary of whose birth is being celebrated this year; Adrian Bell, writer of the classic account of an Englishman's conversion to rural life; F. R. Leavis, the most impressive literary critic of the last century; P. H. Newby, winner of the very first Booker Prize; A. J. P. Taylor, without doubt the most stimulating historian of the twentieth century; and many more - the likes of Peter Anson, Imogen Holst, Richard Cobb, R. C. Hutchinson, George Ewart Evans, John Cowper Powys and A. S. J. Tessimond.

The series will grow and include works in other genres:

... fiction, thrillers, sci-fi, memoirs, biographies, history, poetry, travel books, popular science and books for younger readers.

and through the Lost and Found feature, readers can suggest the titles of books they would like to see brought back into print, and in the Guardian, some authors suggest titles they think should be made available in this way.

Perhaps you'd care to drop them a line too?

Postscript (31/5/08) :

Faber & Faber chief executive Stephen Page talks about Faber Finds in The Telegraph.