“Publisher moves to new office” doesn’t sound much of a story. But the announcement that Faber & Faber is returning to the Bloomsbury streets that T. S. Eliot knew so well — if not quite back to Russell Square itself — will stir strong emotions in literary circles. For Faber is not as other publishers. The very name is a talisman, and its premises have long been a place of pilgrimage.

The original office at 24 Russell Square, now part of London University, bears a plaque marking Eliot and Faber’s long residence. And just a couple of hundred yards away, alongside the British Museum, is 74-77 Great Russell Street, a Grade II Georgian building where Faber will occupy all six floors from early next year.

Faber mattered so much because it was the niche publisher that made modern writing mainstream. And this was largely thanks to the avant-garde author of The Waste Land who joined the fledgeling firm in 1925, and who by the time of his death 40 years later had himself become a Grade I listed monument.

The songsters of the air repair

To the green fields of Russell Square

he wrote, and the songsters of the other elements did too. The poetry list that he edited began with Auden, MacNeice and Pound, then took on de la Mare, Sassoon, Empson, Marianne Moore, Lowell and Thom Gunn, and later added Plath, Hughes, Larkin and Heaney — the kind of dominance that should attract the attentions of the Office of Fair Trading.

A fastidious critic and devout churchgoer, Eliot in his later years was nicknamed “the Pope of Russell Square”. But if Faber was a literary Vatican, it served also as home and refuge for a man who for most of his life hadn’t even a flat to call his own. It was the setting for his work, several deep friendships and for practical jokes in the boardroom, but there were many dark hours too, including long stints of firewatching during the war, when Eliot took shifts with the chairman, Geoffrey Faber.

It was the office that finally brought happiness into his life, too. In August 1949 a new secretary started work for Mr Eliot (as he was known). Valerie Fletcher was already completely devoted to him, and eight years later, in an early-morning ceremony, they were married.

Earlier this year, when Valerie Eliot opened the T. S. Eliot wing of the London Library, Tom Stoppard recalled pacing up and down Russell Square in the 1960s hoping for a glimpse of Eliot. He knew that at one time or another practically every writer and publisher who mattered had negotiated a way past the formidable telephonist, Miss Swan, and taken the rackety lift to the top floor for tea with Mr Eliot (4.30pm, no sugar, supplies of cake sent regularly by admirers).

Stoppard is now, of course, himself a classic Faber author. He is one of those who suit the list as if inevitably. Similarly, when John Calder sold the rights to Samuel Beckett’s prose works recently, it was only natural that they should join his plays under the Faber imprint. He is one of 11 Nobel prizewinners published by the firm. No other house has a backlist like it, and in a literary showdown the top 20 Faber authors could probably take on the top 20 non-Faber authors and outwrite them outright.

The firm has been in Queen Square since 1971, in a building that is more trade paperback than limited edition. Now, though, a black cat is leading Faber back where it belongs — to premises commensurate with the books themselves. If you walk up Great Russell Street, you may see Peter Carey, Giles Foden, Alan Bennett, Maurice Riordan or Garrison Keillor calling in. And remember,

If you ’ave business with Faber - or Faber -

I’ll give you this tip, and it’s worth a lot more:

You’ll save yourself time, and you’ll spare yourself labour

If jist you make friends with the Cat at the door.