28-05-2025
Rosemary Sandberg, dynamic children's publisher who helped to found the Puffin Club
Rosemary Sandberg, who has died aged 84, was one of the outstanding children's publishers of her era, helping Kaye Webb to found the Puffin Club before establishing her own Lions and Picture Lions imprints for Collins.
She later became a literary agent specialising in children's writers. One of her clients, the Horrid Henry creator Francesca Simon, described her as 'quite unique and impossibly glamorous, the Lauren Bacall of children's books'.
She was born in Blackheath on December 16 1939, and grew up in Esher. Her father was Leslie Northcott CBE, a metallurgist who became director of the government research laboratory at Fort Halstead; her mother Constance, née Eley, was a teacher.
After Claremont School in Esher, she read French at King's College London. She became a secretary at the advertising firm J Walter Thompson, where her tasks included bombarding film stars with soap samples to justify the tagline: 'Nine out of 10 film stars use Lux Toilet Soap'.
By 1967 she had drifted into freelance journalism and begun to write a column for 'an old bat on Woman's Journal', who told her one day that Kaye Webb of Puffin Books was looking for an assistant. Kaye Webb had built Puffin, the children's imprint of Penguin Books, into a huge success – known for its slogan, 'Nuffin' like a Puffin' – and Rosemary Sandberg was tasked with helping her to launch the Puffin Club for young readers.
The club, along with its magazine Puffin Post, was launched in March 1967, and within two months had accrued 20,000 members. Rosemary Sandberg recalled the mercurial, charismatic Kaye Webb travelling around the country to host 'puffin sprees' for children – 'she greeted the kids like a whirlwind, clasping them to her great bosom in a cloud of her favourite scent, Youth Dew' – and together they led trips to see puffins on Lundy Island. 'Kaye really was lucky that none of the children drowned,' Rosemary Sandberg told Valerie Grove, author of Kaye Webb's biography So Much to Tell, 'and as for Health and Safety, none of us gave it a second thought.'
Rosemary Sandberg brought marketing nous to the project (when she asked Kaye Webb if she had any marketing reports on children's book sales, the reply came: 'Darling, what are you talking about?') and was introduced to her boss's wide circle of artistic friends, including Laurie Lee, Joyce Grenfell, Malcolm Muggeridge and Yehudi Menuhin.
After four years at Puffin, to Kaye Webb's disgruntlement Rosemary Sandberg was headhunted by Sir Billy Collins to establish a paperback children's book imprint for Collins (later amalgamated into HarperCollins). Generations of children became familiar with the Picture Lions imprint with its distinctive logo of a smiling yellow lion on a circus podium.
Among the books she published were The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog books by Judith Kerr, Dogger by Shirley Hughes (who defected from Puffin because she felt Kaye Webb was underpaying her) and works by Maurice Sendak, Janet and Allan Ahlberg, Quentin Blake and John Burningham.
She was a doughty defender of her books. When the Conservative MP David Tredinnick called for the banning of Felix Pirani's Abigail on the Beach on the grounds that it featured violent bullying and alcohol consumption, she stood her ground: 'We try and show children in real life situations how to deal with what could have been an explosive or volatile situation… If someone gives me one example of it driving a child to the bottle, I will withdraw the book immediately.'
Nevertheless, she also defended the escapism offered by the likes of Enid Blyton. 'Children need a balanced diet, not just what's good for them. If they are denied it, they'll watch television instead.'
In 1991 she was fired from HarperCollins in a notorious mass bloodbath of redundancies ('Even I cried,' noted the notoriously hard-nosed managing director Eddie Bell). She set up her own successful literary agency with co-directors Ed Victor and Graham C Greene, representing writers and illustrators including Francesca Simon, Jane Ray and Babette Cole, before retiring in 2019.
An attempt to revive Puffin Post in 2008 did not impress her: 'It's a manufactured project. The original Puffin Post was organic.'
Rosemary Sandberg is survived by her husband Robin, whom she married in 1964, and their two daughters.
Rosemary Sandberg, born December 16 1939, died April 2 2025
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