If you have wondered who the second Faber in Faber and Faber was, then read the introductory "brief history" of this legendary publishing house in Joseph Connolly's FABER AND FABER: EIGHTY YEARS OF BOOK COVER DESIGN (Faber and Faber, Rs 1,250). "There never was a second Faber," Connolly begins, with an eminently readable lightness sustained throughout this absorbing book, "the second Faber of Faber and Faber was no more than a whimsy, an airy caprice, a deft and harmonious sleight of hand. Geoffrey Faber was the one and only - and although he had previously worked for the Oxford University Press, the idea of becoming a publisher himself was not one he was actively considering - it had come to him more or less out of the blue." In fact, the Carrollian eccentricity of the publishing house's name was a matter of fun for some of its most eminent authors. "When Faber and Faber, the Russell Square twins, wanted a book of light essays and asked me if I had anything of the kind in my cellars, my immediate reply was 'Boys, I've got a trunkful.'" This was Wodehouse, and Faber's 1933 catalogue cover bore a cartoon parody of Carroll depicting "Faberdum & Faberdee". In the following year, as founder director and Faber writer, T.S. Eliot, dithered over the publication of a version of Ulysses, a sulking Joyce dubbed the company "Feebler and Fumbler".

Connolly - a loving collector of first editions and himself a Faber novelist - dedicates this exquisitely designed and reproduced homage to exquisite design and reproduction to Geoffrey Faber, T.S. Eliot, Richard de la Mare and Berthold Wolpe. For him, they are the "architects" of the house that Faber built. Richard, son of the Faber poet Walter, was initially in charge of design, until Wolpe fled to London from Nazi Germany as a beleaguered Jew. Wolpe became the great designer of covers and typefaces, and gave to Faber books their visual, and therefore intellectual and literary, character. This would make these distinguished, and distinguished-looking, books the iconic faces of a certain kind of Anglophone modernity.

Connolly divides the book into sections, each covering a decade from the Thirties to the present, giving us the visual history of a literary culture that mingles a classical consistency of ethos with openness and experimentation. The earlier sections, mainly with Wolpe's hand-painted covers, are an elegy to a vibrant era of hand-crafted book design, which often looks so much more individuated and avant garde than what books from the English-writing world manage to look like today.

Connolly writes how people, when talking of Wolpe, especially after his death in 1989, "simply couldn't help themselves smiling - at his wit, his intractability, his legendary hospitality, his beaky face and singular attire, his extra-worldly insouciance... and, of course, in affectionate gratitude for so peerless an artistic legacy."