Kaye Webb

Kathleen ("Kaye") Webb (26 January 1914 – 16 January 1996), was a British editor and publisher. She has been called an "enormously influential children's editor" and "brilliant as an innovator of highly successful marketing strategies". Her paternal great-great-grandfather was W. G. (William George) Webb, publisher of toy theatres in the Victorian era.

She remained at Lilliput until her marriage in 1948, after which she began working freelance, writing features for the News Chronicle and broadcasting on Woman's Hour, among other commissions. In 1955 she was invited by John Grigg, the owner, to edit the children's literary magazine The Young Elizabethan (afterwards retitled The Elizabethan). In 1961, she became editor of Puffin Books, remaining until 1979. In 1967 she founded the Puffin Club, which she ran until 1981 (also editing its magazine, Puffin Post).

The publisher Andrew Franklin has described Webb as "the first publisher to turn children’s writers into stars". Nicholas Fisk wrote to her in 1979 that "it was the Kaye Webb 'fluence, permeating the whole field, that was so liberating and encouraging. Whatever the Scene is today, most probably you set it".

Webb was a castaway on Desert Island Discs in 1993.

Books Looking at London and People Worth Meeting (1953), News Chronicle, with Ronald Searle Paris Sketchbook (1958), Perpetua Books, with Ronald Searle The St. Trinian's Story: the Whole Ghastly Dossier (ed) (1959), Perpetua Books Refugees 1960: A Report in Words and Drawings (1960), Penguin Books, with Ronald Searle A Book of Goblins (1972), with Alan Garner I Like This Poem (ed) (1979), Puffin Lilliput goes to war (ed) (1985), Hutchinson I Like This Story: a taste of fifty favourites (ed) (1986), Puffin Meet My Friends: Favourite characters and their adventures (ed) (1991), Viking Kestrel Round about six: new stories and poems (ed) (1992), Frances Lincoln Family tree: a collection of favourite poems and stories about all kinds of families (ed) (1994), Hamish Hamilton Let the sun shine: a read aloud collection (ed) (1998), Frances Lincoln