WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 19Wells and Hayes reimagined the board book category with
Very First Books, a series that launched two bunnies named Max
and Ruby. Up until that time, baby and toddler books were all
based on simple concepts. The Max and Ruby books actually
had little plots, told quickly across six spreads.
Eventually, after Hayes became Viking’s publisher, she had to
set down her pencil. “I started out trying to keep certain books
and authors to myself, but I finally realized it was really unfair
to the authors because I’d be keeping them waiting for months,”
she says. “Shaping a list is different from being an editor. It’s
different but it can be just as exciting.”
At Viking, Hayes was also charged with revitalizing Puffin,
the paperback line, which at the time she took over, had an
annual list of 10–12 titles. Nancy Paulsen was managing editor,
and the two of them went to town. “Nobody was really paying
attention to us, so we just plunged in” Hayes says. “It was sort
of like, ‘My father’s got a barn. Let’s put on a show!’ Before we
knew it the list had grown to 75 books. I had to go in and ask
for more acquisition money from our president, Alan Kellock,
and he looked at me and said, ‘75 books? How did that happen?’ ”
Kellock doubled their budget—from $25,000 to $50,000.
The 1980s saw a rapid growth in retail sales, with member-
ship in the Association of Booksellers for Children having
grown to 400 stores. Children’s booksellers needed books they
could handsell directly to adults who might not know what
they wanted—sturdy paperbacks, good-looking reissues of the
classics, and new books that would appeal to a generation of
kids raised on cartoons.
Hayes recalls that in 1987 “a young man came in one day”
to see her. “His portfolio was stunning,” she says. “We were
definitely interested in giving him work, but we didn’t have a
manuscript for him at the moment.”
Lane Smith remembers this meeting vividly, too. “Jon
Scieszka and I had previously been kicked out of several pub-
lishing offices with [what was then titled] A Tale of a Wolf,” he
says. “It had been suggested to us that our weird and slightly
scary take on a classic fairy tale might not be appropriate for
small readers.”
Hayes read the dummy while Smith waited. “This was too
much for my nerves, so I moved to a wall to admire an original
Bemelmans’s Madeline painting,” Smith recalls. “But my ears
were turned around backwards like a cat’s, searching for some
clue to Ms. Hayes’s reaction. Was that a chuckle? Wait, was she
actually laughing? If so, this was a response our book had not
received in the weeks we had been shopping it around.”
Hayes finished and told Smith on the spot she wanted to
publish his book, which was retitled The True Story of the 3 Little
Pigs. “I recall saying, ‘Excellent,’ or something equally noncha-
lant, but if Regina had looked out her window minutes later she
would have seen a madman zig-zagging into traffic, coins
spilling from pockets, wildly looking for a pay phone to tell Jon
our lives had just changed.”
Hayes remembers that, right from the start, Viking hadabout the Logan family. Hayes edited Taylor’s next book, too:
1976’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
“I remember when I first read it thinking, ‘Can this be as good
as I think it is?’ ” Hayes says. “And it was.” The book won the
1977 Newbery Medal. Taylor wrote three more volumes, the
latest of which, All the Days Past, All the Days to Come, was edited
by Hayes and published by Viking in January.
“Those books taken together are just an amazing, intimate
portrait of civil rights in 20th-century America, and they are so
powerful because it is so personal,” Hayes says. “Those stories
are infused with Mildred’s family story, the stories she heard
growing up.”
Perhaps what Hayes cherishes most from her Dial years,
though, is her reunion with James Marshall, whom she had first
worked with at Coward-McCann. “Meeting Jim changed my
whole attitude,” she recalls. “He showed me that children’s
books could be so smart and funny and quietly subversive. His
books were definitely for children, but they also gave adults
something, because he had an incredible sense of humor. You
could just walk down the street with him and he would point
out 10 things that made you laugh, none of which you would
ever have thought of yourself.”
The Viking decades
After nearly a decade at Dial, Hayes became publisher of Viking
Children’s Books in 1982. During her decades there, she edited,
published, and befriended many of the most beloved luminaries
of children’s publishing, including Barbara Cooney, Roald Dahl,
Robert McCloskey, Simms Taback, and Rosemary Wells, whom
Hayes had first worked with at Dial. Wells recalls Hayes being
assigned to edit one of her early novels because it had a Roman
Catholic heroine: “Since Phyllis Fogelman knew nothing about
the Catholic tradition,” Wells says, “she sent my manuscript to
a beautiful brown-haired Irish girl on her staff. It was Regina.
We instantly because mischievous friends, chatty new mothers
as well as editor and writer.”
CHILDREN’S BOOKS| Department
Lane Smith (l.) and Jon Scieszka, whose picture books The True Story
of the 3 Little Pigs and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid
Tales were hits right out of the gate.
© david godlis