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Joseph Connoly |
The art of judging a book by its cover
Joseph Connolly tells Dan Carrier how he felt like ‘a kid in a sweetshop’ when he was asked by Faber and Faber to choose jacket designs for a celebration of the publisher’s 80th anniversary
EIGHTY YEARS OF BOOK COVER DESIGN
By Jospeh Connolly. Faber and Faber £25
THE waft of brewers yeast, the stench of boiling vats of malt and hops, and the musty scent of dray horses filled the room. Enid Faber was heavily pregnant and while she had not noticed it so much before – after all, brewing was the family business for her husband Geoffrey the mother to be found it so unbearable she suggested he might find another occupation.
Alongside learning the family trade at Strong’s Ales in Hampshire, Geoffrey had turned his hand to poetry and was a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
He decided publishing might be an interesting direction to take and teamed up with Sir Maurice and Lady Gwyer, the owners of The Scientific Press.
It was 1925, and the publishers specialised in tomes about hospitals. Geoffrey Faber decided to expand their range and Faber and Gwyer, as it was renamed, set out on the road to produce some of the greatest literary titles of the 20th century.
This was the humble beginning of a publishing house that has printed 13 Nobel prizewinners for Literature – and some of the most eye-catching book cover designs of the past 80 years.
A new book by Hampstead bookseller turned author Joseph Connolly focuses on the front covers that made the company’s name. He has had 10 novels published by Faber and Faber and was drawn to them originally because their front-page designs suggested treats within. It was a case of judging a book by its cover, he says. He recalls how he turned down larger offers for his first novel because Faber and Faber had come in for them, and the stunned response of his agent, the late Giles Gordon.
“I will always remember my state of dazed delight when Giles said to me, ‘what about Faber, yes?’ This I thought was breathtakingly audacious and also utterly hopeless,” recalls Joseph, who ran a second-hand bookshop in Flask Walk. “But Faber did offer for it, and Giles was annoyed with me for accepting, as other publishers had bid more. But I thought that for Faber and Faber to want to buy your first novel, well – can it ever be better?”
The publishing house had some early breaks in choosing authors who went on to become international names. They brought out an anthology of TS Eliot’s poetry, including his seminal work The Wasteland, and the poet became a director, bringing kudos.
The name Faber and Faber was adopted in 1929, when the Gwyers were bought out and the company moved to premises in Russell Square. The story goes that the poet and writer Walter De La Mare, whose son Richard was working for Geoffrey, suggested that they simply used Faber’s name twice. “There never was a second Faber,” explains Connolly. “The second Faber was no more than a whimsy, a deft and harmonious sleight-of-hand.”
The first book Faber printed was an autobiographical work by Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, which saw the poet cast himself as George Sherston, an officer who experienced the carnage on the Western Front and through that became an anti-war campaigner.
Faber’s reputation grew quickly. The poets they published through the 1930s reads like a Who’s Who of the period’s leading literary lights: WH Auden, Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender, James Joyce, Louis MacNeice and Walter De la Mare.
Connolly says he has always had a special love for Faber books, and that being asked to select the covers made him feel like a “kid in a sweetshop”.
“The Faber archive is so magnificent it was pretty daunting,” he said.
“I was not sure at first what I had taken on.”
Designed by the company’s typographer Berthold Wolpe, the tomes were trail-blazing. German-born Wolpe specialised in posters, books and company logos. As Nazism made his position as a Jewish artist in Germany untenable, Wolpe left the country in 1935. Faber and Faber were the beneficiaries.
“He ruled the roost at the publishing house and was able to do exactly as he wished with front covers,” says Joseph.
So while various graphic design styles of the 20th century are represented, Wolpe was a fashion setter, not follower, says Joseph.
“The early stuff in the late 20s and 30s is a sign of what was popular at the time but he quickly made his own rules,” he said. “He used clashing colours, had letters touching each other while some were big and others small. Lots of other people started copying him. What might look like a reflection of design trends is actually Berthold’s making.”
And the ground-breaking use of cover art set the scene for publishers everywhere, says Joseph. Faber’s use of art has since become standard practice.
“Publishers see it as vital,” he says. “The standard of cover art is high and it needs to be. It makes you want to pick them up. Few publishers used to pay attention to the spine but Faber changed that too – these books make you want to take them off the shelves.”
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