Rosemary Sandberg, a literary agent and children's publishing veteran who "witnessed many firsts in children's publishing during her career," has died, the Bookseller reported. She was 85. Sandberg's career began in 1967 at Puffin, where she co-founded the Puffin Book Club. Four years later, she joined Collins Publishers to set up the publisher's first in-house picture book paperback list "at a time when no other children's publishers were doing this."
She went on to create the paperback imprints Lions and Picture Lions for Collins, "with their white covers branded with a cheerful lion on a circus podium, which any child who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s will instantly recognize," the Bookseller noted. Sandberg published about a dozen titles a year, a small number for a paperback publisher, but 90% of the titles remained in print.
"My first criterion became to imagine reading the book to a child," she said. "I think of a child on my lap at bedtime, when the child is maybe a bit gritty; on the first page the book has got to capture the imagination--the child's and mine. It has to interest, excite, hold the attention and delight.... Books have to be well designed and easy on the eye. I remember a child complaining to me once that a particular book had too many words. So I was always very careful about extent, typeface and all that sort of thing."
After 18 years in charge of children's paperbacks at HarperCollins, she founded a literary agency in the 1990s, spending the next three decades as an agent and "becoming very well known to publishers and editors across publishing houses globally. She was extremely well respected, known to be skilled and formidable and was always an energetic advocate for her clients," the Bookseller wrote.
Sandberg is also responsible for some of the bestselling children's titles in the U.K. and the U.S., including Horrid Henry by Francesca Simon and Voyage to the Bunny Planet by Rosemary Wells in the U.S.