ABSTRACT
Despite the brevity of its time as a series published out of London, the life-span of Three Crowns (1962–1976) straddles an important period in the metropolitan support and publishing of African writing. This chapter’s case study of Three Crowns aims thus to fulfil two main functions: to explore the contexts of the metropolitan support of (West) African writing and to set out an archival reconstruction of a series that could have rivalled in importance the African Writers Series but which was hampered, as a direct result of the internal developments at (and contradictions within) Oxford University Press. But in conjunction with the author's more descriptive and reconstructive account, the chapter also explores the specific educational sales contexts of Three Crowns’ emergence, and examines how such a marketing imperative produced a set of enabling and disabling conditions that simultaneously encouraged risks and forays into publishing writers.
