John Bell was a distinguished literary editor with the Oxford University Press, where he helped to foster the careers of several leading postwar children’s authors and later oversaw some of the press’s flagship publications.

He joined the publishing house at a crucial time in its history. With the appointment of Geoffrey Cumberlege as publisher in 1945, something of a new sense of mission entered the London office, a desire for its postwar list to be developed along brighter and more stylish lines than in the past. The policy applied not least to its children’s book publishing, previously dominated by such characters as Biggles and Dimsie, and it was to the children’s book team that John Bell found himself appointed soon after he joined the London office in 1948 on coming down from the university.

John Frederick Bell was born in Kingston upon Hull in 1922 and was schooled there at Hymer’s College, where he was a cricketer as well as a scholar (he once took four wickets for nine runs against Drax). From there he went up to Oriel College, Oxford, to read English, but his studies were interrupted by the war. He joined the Gloucesters and only resumed his academic course five years later, graduating in 1948. (During the last year of his war service he had been a participant in a fondly remembered military mission to Greece where, out of hours, he had exercised his talent for watercolours and the composing of light verse.)

At the press’s quarters at Amen House in Warwick Square, he found himself in something of a warren, such was the diversity of publishing activities in the London office. But a good foundation had been laid by his predecessor for a new-look children’s list and Bell showed at once the temperament and skills that were to characterise his working life at the press. He understood the economic constraints within which publishers had to work. But, while recognising those, he showed a great editorial sympathy with the authors and illustrators whose work he was fostering and a fine feeling for the design and production of their books. He gave ready hospitality to gifted artists such as Edward Ardizzone, Walter Hodges and Harold Jones, whose careers had been interrupted by the war, and was perceptive in handling the early books of new writers such as William Mayne, Philippa Pearce and Rosemary Sutcliff, who were to become pre-eminent among the children’s authors of the second half of the century. Between 1953 and 1955 he performed a publishing hat-trick, three of “his” books winning the Library Association’s Carnegie Medal, with no fewer than eight others being highly commended.

Among other books that he worked on at this time was a poetry anthology, All Day Long, which would be published, with fine illustrations by Joan Hassall, in 1954. Its compiler was Pamela Whitlock, who had achieved fame as a child-author when, with her schoolfriend Katharine Hull, she had written the Ransome-esque story The Far-Distant Oxus (1937) — Arthur Ransome had been so impressed with it that he had got Jonathan Cape, his publisher, to issue it with an introduction by himself. Work with her on All Day Long, however, would lead to an even happier outcome than just a classic volume, for in the year of its publication Bell and Whitlock were to marry. (Through this marriage the two of them became devoted friends of the ageing Ransome, and Bell, alongside Rupert Hart-Davis, would become his literary executor. Later he would also play a paternal role to the infant Arthur Ransome Society.)

Bell’s gifts as an editor were to find a new field of operation when in 1956 he moved over to the London office’s publishing activities in the field of the humanities. Here he was responsible for overseeing many of the press’s most distinguished publications of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Harold Owen’s biography and edition of the letters of his brother Wilfred, or such approachable but scholarly series as the Oxford English Novels and the Oxford English Memoirs and Travels. For more than 20 years he also edited OUP’s classy house magazines, The Record and The Periodical.

Just before the London office was closed in 1976, with staff and resources moving back to Oxford, he joined its academic division, responsible among other things for the Oxford English Texts. The assignment was not made easier by the business problems that the whole publishing industry was enduring at this time and a colleague was later to note how Bell was confronted by “a formidable programme and an equally formidable band of literary scholars whose inexhaustible demands on him he withstood with great calm and affability”. His membership of the Double Crown Club, an august society of printers, publishers, book designers and illustrators, stands token of the respect in which his achievement through all this was held by the professionals of his trade — and also gave him the opportunity to further his marked talent for comic balladry.

He was a natural in his understanding of how the physical presentation of an author’s work might match its purpose — a gift encouraged through his friendship with Vivian Ridler, the great Printer to the University.

After the early death of his wife in 1982 and his consequent retirement from OUP, he set up a press of his own at his cottage at Wootton by Woodstock — the Backwater Press — from which he issued much in the way of entertaining ephemera and also the autobiographical Logbook by Philippa Pearce.

Afflicted by Parkinson’s disease, he had eventually to leave Wootton, taking refuge in a friend’s house in Central London. He is survived by his five daughters.

John Bell, editor and publisher, was born on February 14, 1922. He died on January 21, 2008, aged 85