Stephen Page is the Chief Executive Officer at Faber & Faber. 

We met at his offices in Bloomsbury, London, and invited Geoffrey Faber into the room. The three of us talk, among other things, about publishers being a race apart, comets, the unevenness of publishing, the low barriers to entry, maintaining humility, Paul Hamlyn, colour books and technological breakthroughs, the elasticity of books,  e-books and the beauty of analogue, reading and shopping environments, seduction and hand-crafted books, millennials and the book as object, the Mainstreet Trading bookshop, starting the process of getting people to read a book, Milkman and the difference between originality and difficulty, “legacy” businesses, trust and relationships, providing value to writers, the ‘ff’ colophon and cultural value, CATS, risk and editorial impulse, Kazuo Ishiguro and honouring authors now, sales and realism, superlatives, copy and honesty, formats and creating energy, design briefs, Woody Allen, the vocation of publishing, the gift of social media, advertising, James Daunt, Waterstones, independents and Amazon, The Doves Press, and books as a life-blood of civilized humanity.