Faber & Faber Launches T. S. Eliot Site with Unpublished Material

British publisher Faber & Faber, in conjunction with the estate of T. S. Eliot, has debuted a new website devoted to the late poet: tseliot.com. The site features a virtual treasure trove of unseen, never published, and very rare Eliot material, including poetry, letters, essays, and photographs.

Faber & Faber plans to continue to add to the website over time, eventually making all of Eliot's correspondence freely available. The site also includes such rarities as the first and last issue of The Criterion, the journal that Eliot founded in 1922 and edited until it closed down in 1939.

"It's been a long time in the planning," said Faber press director Henry Volans in a press statement with The Guardian. "My view is that publishers have engaged with the web a bit as a marketing platform, not taking advantage of its full potential, and this is a step closer [to that] ... It's a companion to Eliot himself, more than to the books, and I love the idea that it will appeal to students as well as to general readers."

The site will also serve as a gateway for writers to apply for a residency at Eliot's childhood house in Massachusetts, which the T. S. Eliot Foundation acquired last year with plans to renovate into a writers residency.

For this blogger, the deceptively simple interface on the site quickly led me down a variety of fascinating rabbit holes. I particularly enjoyed reading through some of Eliot's letters and scrolling through the pages of photographs, which are set to displaly like a Pinterest board. It's an engaging, enriching website and I look forward to seeing what else is added over time (and if this same model is applied by others).

Image Courtesy of tseliot.com.