When Eleanor Graham, the experienced and rather severe editor of the Puffin Story Books, retired in 1961, it was widely assumed that she would be succeeded by her well-known and hard-working deputy Margaret Clark. Great was the consternation when the capricious Allen Lane appointed instead Kaye Webb – a journalist best known for her editorial connections with the magazine Lilliput and her collaborations with her husband then, Ronald Searle.

As things turned out, Lane was wiser than he knew. Webb started nearly 20 years of the liveliest promotion that children’s books had ever received, while Clark moved on to the children’s division of the Bodley Head – initially only for a month – and joined its two resident editors, Jill Black and Judy Taylor, in developing a publishing list of formidable quality. What may well have been fundamental to Clark’s success in this new capacity was the opportunity that she was given to work with authors who were creating children’s literature for our times, whereas at Puffins much of her work had been concerned with the refashioning and publicising of previously published books for what was then the little-exploited paperback market.

The opportunity suited Clark’s essentially serious but forward-looking temperament. She had been born in 1926 in Darlington, and although her parents were churchgoers she was educated as a day-girl at the Quaker school of Polam Hall before reading English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

After graduating she joined the BBC and for a couple of years she was secretarial assistant to Louis MacNeice. Moving to Harmondsworth she soon experienced what she called Allen Lane’s “alarming style of management”. The spartan conditions in which the staff worked in the 1950s “provided an appropriate atmosphere with which we pursued his cause” of “bringing self-education and the enjoyment of literature within the reach of anyone with sixpence to spend”.

For a while she was Lane’s secretary but then became plenipotentiary for Graham who worked in the comfort of her flat in Bloomsbury, where she also edited children’s books for Methuen. This left Clark to face the not always complimentary reactions of the specialist production and publicity staff at Harmondsworth.

At the Bodley Head’s offices in Bow Street, Clark developed a responsibility for the firm’s children’s fiction and poetry, as well as establishing its notable list of books, such as the essay collection The Cool Web (1977), which catered for the growing constituency of teachers, librarians and educationists seeking to redress the age-old neglect of children’s literature among those responsible for children’s upbringing. Ironically, perhaps, for Clark, the success of that campaign, which is still visible today, was much aided by Webb’s dynamic activities at Puffins.

Like all the Bodley Head books of these years before the firm’s absorption into the Random House conglomerate, Clark’s were helped towards distinction by the genius of the production director, John Ryder, and it is matter for regret that many of the books whose publication she oversaw have not survived the current fashions.

Lucy Boston, whose later work she edited, paid tribute to her skills in her memoir Memory in a House (1973) and these are seen most notably in her cultivated regard for poetry, conspicuous in her editing of David Mackay’s A Flock of Words(1969) and of the Bodley Head Poets series (1964-72) – great poetry selected by eminent and sympathetic modern writers.

Clark was also foremost among British editors in seeking to cater for a teenage readership through the Bodley Head’s “New Adults” series of fiction, following and sometimes, as with Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, adopting texts from the already busy exploitation of the genre in the US. (An influential British “first” came with Breaktime (1978) by Aidan Chambers.)

In 1980, Clark became the chief of the Bodley Head’s children’s division, and even after her retirement in 1988 she continued with what was more or less a lifetime’s preoccupation with children’s literature.

She compiled several books, including a handsome edition of The Best of Aesop’s Fables, illustrated by Charlotte Voake (1990), and she was an active member of the Children’s Books History Society, whose committee meetings at her house were conducted under the eye of her temperamental Jack Russell. (This terrier she had inherited from her father, for whom she had cared in his declining years – an experience which led her to vigorous support of the charity Crossroads, which seeks to alleviate the problems that carers within families may face.)

She enjoyed a fruitful association with the magazine Signal which, up to its closure with its 100th number in 2003, was the most imaginative and stylish of all periodicals devoted to children’s books. Her know-ledgeable contributions to that journal awaken regrets that she never wrote an autobiography of her life in publishing.

This year, Clark was found to be suffering from a brain tumour.

Margaret Clark, editor of children’s books, was born on September 19, 1926. She died on April 25, 2007, aged 80