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Faber and Faber Author File on Jacob Peter Mayer
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Held at: Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division [Contact Us]
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Overview and metadata sections
Faber and Faber is a British publishing house based in London, England. Founded by Geoffrey Faber in 1929 after the dissolution of Faber and Gwyer (1925-1929), the firm was initially most famous for its poetry list but later expanded to include biographies, memoirs, fiction, political and religious essays, art and architecture monographs, children's books, and ecology titles. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was an early editor and director who had a significant influence over the firm's direction. Faber and Faber published Eliot's literary review, The Criterion, and Eliot also published many major English poets, including W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Stephen Spender, and Charles Madge.
Consists of an author file kept by the British publishing house Faber and Faber and editor T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) on Jacob Peter Mayer (1903–1992), a German-born scholar of Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and Max Weber and professor at the University of Reading. There are twenty letters and one secretarial note from T. S. Eliot to Mayer, mostly related to Mayer's books published by Faber and Faber, but also touching on other literary subjects including Eliot's own The Cocktail Party and writers André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Books by Mayer that come under discussion include his study of Max Weber and the structure of German politics, a proposed translation of a Soviet book on film, and his Sociology of Film (1946). Also present is a two-page typescript draft of a blurb written by Eliot about Sociology of Film. Additional correspondence includes letters from other principals of the firm such as Geoffrey Faber, Richard de la Mare, Morley Kennerley, and P. F. du Sautoy, as well as a few retained copies of Mayer's letters to Eliot. The majority of the materials consist of correspondence with Eliot and other Faber and Faber editors, but there are also some related contracts, publication lists, publishers' catalogs, and proposals for future books.
Purchased from Charles Agvent in 2021 (AM 2022-040).
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This collection was processed by Kelly Bolding in October 2021. Finding aid written by Kelly Bolding in October 2021.
No materials were removed from the collection during 2021 processing.
People
- Eliot, T.S. (Thomas Stearns) (1888-1965)
- Mayer, J. P. (Jacob Peter) (1903-1992)
- Weber, Max (1864-1920)
Subject
- Publisher
- Manuscripts Division
- Finding Aid Author
- Kelly Bolding
- Finding Aid Date
- 2021
- Sponsor
- Processing of this collection was sponsored by the Delafield Fund.
- Access Restrictions
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Open for research use.
- Use Restrictions
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Collection Inventory
Includes twenty letters and a secretarial note from T.S. Eliot. There is also a letter from L. Melton with an enclosure that is a two-page typed manuscript of a blurb written by T.S. Eliot for Mayer's Sociology of Film (1946).
EliotT.S. Eliot, the noted modern poet, dramatist, and literary critic, was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned a master's degree from Harvard University, which is when he met Emily Hale in 1913. The two formed a close bond, and when Eliot moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 to begin his PhD studies (eventually becoming a British subject in 1927) they remained in contact, establishing a robust correspondence that would continue intermittenly for years. In addition to his writing, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher and a bank accounts manager before joining the publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber) in 1925, where he worked for the remainder of his career. Best known for such poems as The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, and Four Quartets, Eliot was the recipient of the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Physical Description1 folder
1 folder
1 folder