IT’S too early to say what’s happening at the moment, but around about now book sales in the UK would normally be bringing in around £40 million per week in the run-up to Christmas.

However, that total was surpassed early last month, thanks to the pandemic.

New titles and old – printed, digitalised or recorded – have seen a remarkable surge in sales due to Covid-19, with an intriguing revival of interest in the classics and in yesteryear’s best-sellers.

And it was a former soldier in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers who, early on, spotted some of the top authors making their comeback today, and who also championed Portora’s literary genius, Samuel Beckett.

Lisburn-born Charles Monteith was commissioning editor at Faber and Faber when the company published William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Philip Larkin’s A Girl in Winter, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, T.S. Eliot’s early poems, and numerous other iconic authors and poets.

Monteith’s influence on literature was remarkable.

He played a vital role as the friend and publisher of some of the world’s greatest writers, outlined in a book about Faber & Faber – The Untold Story – that was researched and written by former managing editor, Toby Faber, the grandson of company founder, Geoffrey Faber.

It goes without saying that the publisher is a giant in the global literary world, having brought us some of the absolute greats of world literature already mentioned, along with Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, W. H. Auden, James Joyce, Philip Larkin, Kazuo Ishiguro and 2018 Booker prize winner, Anna Burns.

When Seamus Heaney’s first poetry was accepted by Faber, he wrote: “I just couldn’t believe it; it was like getting a letter from God the Father.”

The story behind Lisburn’s Charles Monteith “rescuing” the script of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies goes back to 1953, when Monteith had just started as a Faber & Faber editor.

Wanting something to read as he left his office to catch a train to Oxford, he “grabbed the top bundle from the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts; its dog-eared nature was a testament to the number of publishers who had already seen and presumably rejected it”.

A covering letter with the manuscript, signed by William Golding, explained that it was entitled ‘Strangers from Within’.

“I hope you will feel able to publish it,” Golding added.

A Faber script-reader had already gone through the manuscript, and concluded: “Absurd and uninteresting ... Rubbish and dull. Pointless. Reject.”

Charles Monteith read it on the train, liked it and wrote to William Golding on October 15, 1953: “I should very much like to have a talk with you about it.”

They talked, Golding made amendments, and suggested a new title: ‘A Cry of Children’.

Faber fellow-editor, and Board Director, lan Pringle proposed another title – ‘Lord of the Flies’ – which Monteith liked.

On May 20, 1954, Charles wrote to Golding: “I’m even more enthusiastic about it than I was before. Though I must have read it through four or five times by now, I still simply couldn’t put the proofs down until I had finished them.

“It’s had precisely the same effect on several other people here ... What a terrific book it is.”

And the rest is literary history!

Charles Monteith was involved with the work of many other literary giants.

“I was enormously impressed by ‘A Girl in Winter’,” he wrote, in a letter to poet and novelist, Philip Larkin, in 1953.

“I thought you would be interested to know that ‘Waiting for Godot’ is being very successful indeed,” he wrote to Samuel Beckett in 1956, adding: “The book is selling fast, and exciting much interest and discussion everywhere.”

Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother in 1960 about a Faber & Faber party held for W. H. Auden that she’d attended with husband-to-be Ted Hughes.

“During the party Charles Monteith beckoned me out into the hall. And there Ted stood, flanked by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice on the one hand, and Stephen Spender on the other, having his photograph taken.

“’Three generations of Faber poets there’, Charles observed, ‘Wonderful!’,” she wrote.

Charles Montgomery Monteith was born in Lisburn on February 9, 1921.

He was educated at RBAI and Magdalen College Oxford, and served with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in India and Burma during World War II, where he was very seriously wounded.

He was Director at Faber & Faber, from 1954-74; Vice-Chairman, 1974-76; Chairman, 1977-80; and Senior Editorial Consultant, 1981-95.

He was also Director, Poetry Book Society, 1966-81; a Literature Panel Member, in the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974-78; and a Member of the Library Advisory Council for England, 1979-81.

Charles Monteith died on May 9, 1995. ‘Faber & Faber: The Untold Story of a Great Publishing House’ is published by Faber & Faber.