Children's publishing veteran Rosemary Sandberg dies aged 85

Rosemary Sandberg, literary agent and children’s publishing veteran, has died at the age of 85. Sandberg witnessed many firsts in children’s publishing during her career, which began in 1967, when she began working at Puffin where she co-founded the Puffin Book Club. During this time, she also had her first child, who she said she put in a carrycot and kept under her desk while she worked.

Following four years at Puffin, she was poached by Billy Collins (of 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. 

Following this move, she set up 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 recognise. 

For Picture Lions, Sandberg focused on quality not quantity and featured household picture book names, including Judith Kerr, Maurice Sendak, the Ahlbergs, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes, Arnold Lobel and John Burningham. Sandberg published around a dozen titles a year, a small number for a paperback publisher, but her eye for books with lasting power was key, with around 90% of titles staying in print. On choosing her list, she said: "My first criterion became to imagine reading the book to a child. 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."

For Sandberg, the child’s experience reading was paramount: "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 her own literary agency in the 1990s and has represented many of the children’s publishing greats, including Francesca Simon, Jane Ray, Selina Young and Babette Cole from the UK and Rosemary Wells, Susan Jeffers and Steven Kellogg from the US.

She spent around 30 years as an agent, 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.

Sandberg advised new writers to "be incredibly self-critical, as to stand a chance you have got to produce something better than most of what is already published. The standard is so very high, and only the very best will be published".

Sandberg is also responsible for launching millions of life-long readers and some of the bestselling children’s titles in the UK and the US, including Horrid Henry by Francesca Simon and Voyage to the Bunny Planet by Rosemary Wells in the US, leaving behind a "remarkable legacy".