The changing face of Faber

The lead item in Faber's first catalogue was Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman which had been published anonymously the year before. Handsomely illustrated by William Nicholson, it was reprinted eight times in its first six months Photograph: Faber and Faber

First published in 1939, TS Eliot's much-loved collection of poems about cats was transformed into a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1981 Photograph: Faber and Faber

First published in 1948, Robert Graves's The White Goddess argued that 'true' poetry is bound up with the worship of a moon goddess and her son Photograph: Faber and Faber

Ted Hughes's first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957, after TS Eliot suggested to a colleague that he was 'inclined to think we ought to take this man now' Photograph: Faber and Faber

Published two years after her death in 1963, and edited by Ted Hughes, Ariel marked a new departure for Sylvia Plath, with a more intimate, confessional style Photograph: Faber and Faber

First published in 1984, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was part of a new international turn at Faber, under the editorship of Robert McCrum. The cover drawing is by the author himself Photograph: Faber and Faber

Andrew Motion's 1993 biography of Philip Larkin, together with a selection of Larkin's correspondence published the year before, transformed the image of the nation's favourite poet from grumbling teddy bear to grizzly misogynist Photograph: Faber and Faber

Don Paterson's Landing Light, published in 2003, a stark example of the stripped-down design of recent Faber poetry Photograph: Faber and Faber