18 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 9, 2020
she says. “The
bosses hadn’t real-
ized how much
gold there was in
‘them thar hills.’ ”
Among the
seismic changes
Hayes has seen in
her career was the
discovery of that
gold, the enormous growth of a retail market for both frontlist
and backlist books, and a revolution in the way books are mar-
keted. “When I started, you basically just threw a book out
there,” she says. “Other than getting it to the important librar-
ians, there was no marketing.”
There has also been, of course, a complete technological trans-
formation in the way that books are made. Hayes remembers
the laborious process of preseparating colors for illustrations,
and the days when only three colors could be used because “four-
color was too expensive.” When she began at Coward-McCann,
freelancers created book jackets, but the rest of the book’s
elements were designed in-house and by hand.
“You got out the typeface book and figured out what font you
wanted for a chapter head, and then you used tracing paper to
copy it,” Hayes says. She learned the business from editor-in-
chief Alice Torrey, who had an unsentimental attitude about
children’s literature. “She always had a cigarette dangling from
her lip and she used to say, ‘The one word I don’t want to hear
is cute.’ ”
After seven years, Hayes moved to Dial to work for legendary
editor Phyllis Fogelman. Unlike Coward-McCann, Dial had its
own art director, Atha Tehon, who, Hayes says, “had high
standards and exquisite taste.” She adds that when she told
Tehon about designing her own books at Coward-McCann,
“she almost fainted. I got a real education in design from her.”
Fogelman, who personally edited the works of Tom Feeling
and Julius Lester, was committed to diversity decades before it
became a publishing imperative. After acquiring a manuscript
that had won the Council on Interracial Books writing contest,
she assigned Hayes to edit it. The book was Song of the Trees by
Mildred D. Taylor, the first book in Taylor’s (eventual) quintetR
egina McDonnell Hayes arrived in
New York City in 1966 after a two-
year stint as an au pair in Paris, unsure
of what to do next. She signed with
a temp agency, accepting a variety of
dull assignments until, one day, she landed in the
offices of Coward-McCann, a now-defunct division
of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, working for the publicity
director. Serendipity intervened: a new colleague
confided she was quitting and suggested Hayes
should apply for her job, working with the children’s editor.
“They hired me, but I don’t think there were any other appli-
cants,” Hayes says. “I knew from the first week that this was
what I was meant to do. The idea that the people in that office
read books all day was enough.”
On February 1, 54 years later, Hayes retired from Viking
Children’s Books, where she had been publisher for 30 years and
an editor-at-large since stepping down from her publisher role
in 2012.
The editor of numerous award-winning books, steward of a
storied backlist, beloved mentor of authors and junior col-
leagues, she says she wanted to leave without fanfare. “I had
been thinking about it for a while but I didn’t give them much
warning,” says Hayes, who fought attempts to send her off
with a lot of “fuss.” Instead, the office had a little gathering,
during which her colleagues toasted her and gave her their best
wishes electronically. “They went into the video studio and
put them all on a thumb drive so I could watch them at home
later, because they knew I would have been mortified to watch
in public.”A bookish kid
As a child, Hayes says she was the stereotypical “kid with her nose
in a book all the time.” She majored in psychology at Newton
College, now a part of Boston College. “I started as an English
major but it was ruining my reading,” she recalls. “I didn’t want
to analyze the books. I just wanted to enjoy them.”
As a result, Hayes began work in publishing with no formal
education in literature or editing, and, at the time, that was
okay. “There was not much pressure on us or even attention to
what we were doing, because we were just a backwater then,”Exit
Interview
Viking Children’s editor
Regina Hayes retires
after 54 years in
publishing
BY SUE CORBETT
© mark zelinski