Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a publisher. Her professional life has been crowded with experience in the

thirtish. She worked for several magazines becoming assistant editor of Lilliput, where she solicited

contributions from such distinguished authors as Evelyn War, Bernard Shaw and Dylan Thomas.

In the 60s she was made editor of Puffin Books, a job she held for nearly 20 years presiding

over a revolution in children's reading.

Sales of puffin books increased 300% under her editorship

and influenced a whole generation of children

with titles such as Stig of the Dump and Watership Down.

Her idea, she says, was that children's publishers should not be in it for the money, but to create

literate children.

She is Kay Webb.

Was that ever true, do you think, Kay, that Puffin was more interested in encouraging children to read than making money?

Well, when Sir Allen was alive, it was, really.

He was frightfully good he he used to say oh swings around about if

we lose on this book we'll make better readers he was the founder yes

Alan Dane so did you never feel the accountants breathing down

your neck? Did you always have a sense of freedom to pick up whatever book you came

across if you fancied it? Yes, I did because Alan believed it, you know. Mind you, I didn't do them for nothing and I had to make them pay, but it wasn't the first stricture.

But the trick is of course to do both, isn't it, to you? Which is what you did in the end, that if you encourage children to read more, then more

books are bought for them.

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