Abstract: director of Heinemann Educational Books James Currey recalls a pivotal moment in the expansion of the series.The scene follows a brief description of some significant changes in Heinemann's logistical network:Initially Heinemann books were stocked and distributed by Longman, but in 1972 Aig Higo, just after the end of the civil war, built a substantial Heinemann warehouse at Jericho in Ibadan in time to be able to handle the African Writers Series by the container load during the oil boom in the middle 1970s.A vivid memory of that period is of seeing the doors of a container being opened in the yard at the warehouse and of a raft of copies of Kenneth Kaunda's Zambia Shall be Free flooding out on a wave of sea-water. 1 The AWS business model relied on a combination of local and foreign production; often, manuscripts were sent to the UK for typesetting and printing, to be subsequently re-imported into African markets. 2 It is therefore