Happy Birthday Picture Lions

This month Picture Lions celebrate ten years of successful publishing. A birthday present which pleased and somewhat surprised everyone at Fontana came in the form of the news that in terms of annual sales Picture Lions now lead all other paperback picture book imprints. The list which has sold ten million copies since it was launched now stands at just over a hundred titles. Each year twelve or fourteen new titles are added – a small number in paperback publishing – and because 90% of titles are kept in print the list has a reassuring stability. It also has a well-deserved reputation for high quality.

The person behind this remarkable achievement is the editor and founder of Picture Lions, Rosemary Sandberg.

We invited her to talk about her approach to publishing.

I was extremely lucky that 11 years ago after working for five years with Kaye Webb at Puffin I was offered the chance by Collins to create a brand new picture paperback series. I had two children of my own – they were three and one then – and so I was in an ideal position to see books work or not. The importance, the necessity of having books around a child, even one as young as a year or eighteen months, so that they are as familiar as the teddy bear, just part of the household scenery – this came to me every day. So I suppose it was in a way natural that when choosing what to publish – an exciting but exceedingly daunting prospect – my first criterion became to imagine reading the book to a child. This is still the most important thing for me. 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. It takes enormous skill on the part of the author and artist to do that, to create a world, build characters, tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, in the space of say five hundred words and to see and tell it all through the child’s eyes without patronising: so many disciplines in so little time and space. It is only achieved by writers and artists of a high calibre and a sensitivity to the views and responses of the young child. Shirley Hughes can do it, and Judith Kerr. I chose two of her books, Mog the Forgetful Cat and The Tiger Who Came to Tea for the launch list. Thousands of enthusiastic parents, teachers and children have kept both those, and others of the original titles, in print.

I choose twelve or so titles each year. Maybe I could find more but the shops don’t have elastic shelves and looked at in one way we could stop and not publish any more, there is quite enough. But, of course, we want to maintain interest and excitement and naturally some books go out of favour and new artists, writers, titles come in. Who wouldn’t want to publish the Ahlbergs’ Each Peach Pear Plum, Shirley Hughes’ Dogger, Quentin Blake’s Mister Magnolia and Gabrielle Vincent’s Ernest and Celestine? These are absolutely timeless. I can’t see any reason for them ever to go out of print.

A book has to be worth a child spending time on. The quality of the storytelling and pictures, the originality of the idea (or at least an original slant on an old theme) are the first and most important considerations in choosing. But there are others. The physical look of the book is extremely important. For Picture Lions we are reducing hardback books down to one of two sizes, 8″ x 8″ or 81/2″ x 6″. I try to ensure that the reduction is not going to damage the look of the book in any way. We put the book under a machine which reduces the page so we can see what it is going to look like. I am also concerned about the size of the type. A young child may not be reading but it is getting used to the idea of words and I letters, picking it up bit by bit. When the type is too small a little eye just gets confused. What we usually do is reduce the illustrations and keep the type size the same as the hardback, so in fact in proportion it’s larger than in the hardback. Whether we can do this depends on the design. Many hardback houses show me artwork and stories first and, if I like it, and say `Yes, that’s going to work well with Picture Lions’, they can then design their book with my reduced edition in mind. Hardback publishers are very much aware of this now. No-one wants to interfere in the creative process but it’s just common sense, because I’ve only got two formats, that if they want to sell me a book they bear this in mind. I’m dependent on what hardback publishers are publishing; but they like to have the wider audience for their author and their books that a paperback brings, so it’s very much a two-way operation.

Picture Lions are quite consciously directed at the younger end of the market. I am interested in the idea of picture books for older children but it would be confusing for the market if I included them in Picture Lions. Given that, I am conscious that children read at many levels; we can be too narrow in our thinking about books and ages. When we launched Picture Lions, I put at the back of each book a list of other books to be read in the series and I headed it `For 3-6 year olds’. Immediately teachers wrote and said, `Please don’t print this kind of thing because we have slow learning 9 year-olds who really enjoy Picture Lions’. They were right. That is why I don’t specify age groups on the books. I know booksellers would very much like us to do that because it would make it easier for them. But I don’t want to spoil a book for a child who is going to be humiliated by the fact that this book is `for a six-year-old’ and there he is at ten actually rather enjoying it. In bookshops we can help booksellers by displaying Picture Lions on a handy spinner (Young Lions are a more difficult problem). I’d like parents to recognise that there they will find books that will excite and extend their children, books that will offer variety in ways of seeing and depicting the world, different artistic styles, different points of view, books they can trust because they were chosen on the basis of children’s response to them. I’d like teachers to be prepared to experiment, to look at Picture Lions for what they have to offer to children learning to read, real stories which while they help children to learn how to do it will be encouraging the reading habit because they are enjoyed. They may find a book like John Burningham’s Come Away from the Water, Shirley which works on several levels at the same time. A young child can enjoy the pictures of Shirley’s imagined exploits, older or more sophisticated readers will appreciate the wonderful double story that is going on. But it doesn’t fail at any level and that’s the important thing.

In deciding what to publish I go on hunch and experience, based in part on spending quite a lot of time with children, watching them read, watching them respond, listening to teachers, talking to librarians, booksellers and parents. At the moment I’m buying for 1985 and there are some excellent books being published. I think we’ve got over the clever, clever publishing period when a lot of picture books were really for the adult market – lovely to have picture books for adults but don’t give them to children who will just be confused and bored by them. And pop-ups are settling into place – they are fun and there are some really good ones but they shouldn’t arrive at the expense of real books with stories.

This year I’m thrilled to have John Burningham’s Would You Rather; it’s exactly the book to show children what reading is, from there they can rush on excitedly on their own. Helme Heine’s Friends is funny, light and joyous; in contrast Susan Varley’s Badger’s Parting Gifts is about how old badger’s friends console themselves, when he dies, with memories of his friendship. Done badly or even moderately it could be mawkish. This is beautiful. Everyone at Fontana loves Picture Lions; when I’ve bought a new one it goes round the office – hard-nosed fiction publishers and the non-fiction academic people all want to see it. There were a lot of lumps in throats in Grafton Street when that one came in. One last thing I particularly want to mention. The success of Picture Lions owes a great deal to the quality of British hardback publishing for children. Every year at the Bologna Book Fair I go to the American stand, I look at the French books and the German and I always come racing back to the British pavilion because there I find a sense of humour and a lightness of touch that is missing elsewhere. It’s always a great joy to look at British picture books and realise that, neglected and forgotten as I think we sometimes are, our children’s publishing is – I hesitate to say – the best in the world, but that’s exactly what I mean.