Christine Baker was a lady of great discretion. We have read Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, At the crossroads of the worlds by Philip Pullman… without knowing her name when it is through her that these great English sagas arrived in France. Without Christine Baker, the literature of the last millennium would have been changed. The former editorial director of Gallimard jeunesse died at the age of 71, the publishing house announced.
“Christine has been a key figure in youth publishing,” reads her press release. For more than 44 years, Christine Baker has defended “the most beautiful texts, the greatest authors and illustrators of children’s literature”. Michael Morpurgo, Timothée de Fombelle, Lian Hearn, Quentin Blake, it’s still her. By her flair and her convictions, she knew how to constitute “a unique literary heritage”.
Christine Baker was born in Sens in 1952. After studying modern literature, she became a bookseller in Paris where she had already shown her ambitions for children’s literature, and had created the first youth department. Then she went to London, to the Children’s Book Center bookstore, then the only specialized children’s bookstore in the world.
In 1978, when she met Pierre Marchand, who had just launched a youth department within Gallimard, she joined the prestigious publishing house. Twenty years after her arrival, she revolutionized children’s literature. Last January, Hedwige Pasquet, director of Éditions Gallimard jeunesse, told Le Figaro: “In 1998, Christine Baker was our editor in London. She heard about Harry Poter from a librarian in Scotland. She read it, immediately liked it and did everything to have it published in France.”
A crazy bet, while novels of more than 300 pages, moreover written with long sentences and difficult themes, went against the publishing habits of the time. But Christine Baker believed in the magic of J.K. Rowling’s book. “Some people thought that we could not give complex subjects to children”, analyzed Hedwige Pasquet. We know the rest, as the world exhibition of Harry Potter has just opened in Paris, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first volume in France. Today, the 7 Harry Potter books have exceeded 35 million copies in French.
“Always guided by a search for excellence and innovation, Christine has never ceased to develop the catalog in all its diversity, giving it a French and international influence, for fiction as for non-fiction and for all the ages”, we still read in the press release from Gallimard Jeunesse. “We are losing a colleague, a friend, a great lady, an inspiring figure.”