Founding art director of Walker Books who oversaw some of the company’s great children’s classics including We’re Going on a Bear Hunt

 

From The Guardian obituary by Patrick Benson.

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Amelia Edwards, who has died aged 77, was the art director of Walker Books and one of the most important influences on children’s book publishing in the 20th century. Working with some of the best illustrators and writers of the age, she built a list of classic titles that shaped the reading experience of generations of children.

In 1978 the entrepreneurial Sebastian Walker invited her to join him as the first employee of his fledgling company, Walker Books. It rapidly became Britain’s leading independent children’s publisher.

Amelia’s design talent came at a particular moment in the history of children’s books, when the advent of cheap four-colour printing made possible new and adventurous forms of publishing. Colour separation was becoming increasingly sophisticated, as was the software used in book production. She quickly mastered the new technologies, but was always acutely sensitive to the deep traditions of storytelling. She knew how to read a text and bring out the pacing in a narrative better than anyone. She had only one aim – to get the story to tell itself properly to a child.

Amelia and Sebastian shared the belief that the most important people in publishing are the authors and artists who create the books. She was a champion of the right of illustrators to be paid properly and given the best possible contracts. This attracted many distinguished illustrators to the company; what made them stay was the presence of a designer who was their equal and understood their work.

The artist Helen Oxenbury, who worked with her for more than 20 years, said: “She will fight tooth and nail to achieve what she considers to be the perfect book for each author/illustrator. Nothing is too much trouble. No amount of hours are too long in the struggle to get a detail exactly right. No paper is too expensive if she has decided that is what the book demands. One is never told, ‘Sorry, I can’t do that.’ She is quite simply the best and has done more for the way people regard children’s books than anyone I know.”

Millions of children and adults have received profound pleasure from the classic books Amelia helped create, such as We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Farmer Duck, Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear?, The Mousehole Cat, Five Minutes’ Peace, Guess How Much I Love You, Owl Babies, Here Comes Mother Goose, I Saw Esau, and editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Gulliver’s Travels. She is the only art director to have won the Eleanor Farjeon award for distinguished services to children’s books (in 2001).

She was born Amelia Santaromita in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, John, worked for a transport company while her mother, Marie, was a dressmaker. Amelia studied art at a local community college before starting her career as a designer for the American Book Company. In the late 1960s, on a holiday in London, she met her future husband, Danny Edwards, and decided to stay. She got a job with the publisher Marshall Cavendish, where she met Walker.