Lunch with Mr Eliot and Kazuo Ishiguro with a guitar: untold tales from a lost literary Britain | Books | The Guardian

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.