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program called “Reading in the Classroom” which had an

associated catalogue with suitable reading books that

teachers could select for reading material in the classroom.

It then took three full years to understand how to meet the

criteria for that system; to get suitable books authors and

illustrators and how to beat the bureaucratic Brazilian

system and the protocol that surrounded it. This was a very

long task but one of the criteria I set for myself was to offer

a suitable book for 7 to 11-year-old boys about the

footballer Pele amongst others. By u sing this famous

name would I hoped to motivate that target group.

Up to this point in time I had made many friends inside the

publishing industry of Brazil which incidentally was huge

and highly competitive. An average order for a UK book to

start its print run would be ordered in the low thousands,

2000 being an average. Consider that one of our Brazilian

book sales was for 176,000 books in one order. That is the

sort of volume that the public sector educational market

attracts.

The other publishing directors of the Brazilian national

companies were very helpful to me but there came a cut-

off point when they could no longer help me because I

needed new authors and new illustrators and they had

them all. Obviously, they would not be passed across to

me as a highly competitive gringo publisher. We remained

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