Telling the Faber story

There was a clear arc to the story: the early struggle and the arguments with shareholders that accompanied the foundation of the firm, the luck and insight that led Geoffrey Faber to recruit TS Eliot as an editor, the need to adapt to the post-war world, the almost-bankruptcy in 1970, the turnaround fuelled by money from Cats in the 1980s, and then, finally, the restructuring in 1990 that reinforced the firm's independence when all its competitors were being swallowed into conglomerates. I knew many of the individual stories that I wanted to tell, too: the elaborate jokes the directors played on each other in the 1930s, Lord of the Flies being rescued from the slush pile, the rejection of Animal Farm, and Eliot's handwritten note on a memo about Ted Hughes: "I think we ought to take this man now. Let's discuss him."