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History of Martin Leeuwis Publications

During my Royal Netherlands Air Force years, 1974 until 1984, I started a small company mainly for tax avoidance reasons. Initially the company name was MotUnltd but later the name was changed into Martin Leeuwis Import and Export. The products were many and varied but all were related to aviation. In those days we were selling printed t-shirts, embroidered (name) badges, sweaters, silver aircraft models, stickers, cotton jackets, aerial banner tows, etc, in the spare time the Air Force allowed me.

But our main product for quite some years were cartoon books from the USA. We were the representative for the whole of Europe for the books by Bob Stevens. "There I was" and "More there I was" with World War 2 stories and cartoons. His third book "If you read me, rock the tower" contained a lot of my contributions and this gave me an idea.

With a good cartoonist I could publish my own books, based on the humorous ideas I had or heard.

In 1982 my dreams came true. The Air Force was paying me a lot of money again at a contract end. The money was not immediately necessary  as I was single and driving a Porsche anyhow, and I  found Ton van Andel. Ton is a very nice guy and a brilliant cartoonist. He also had a lifetime of ideas for aviation cartoons ready in his scrapbooks.

At the end of 1982 "Say again" was published and the book was greeted with very positive reviews in aviation magazines allover the world. Compared with the sales from the US books this was much better and all other products from Martin Leeuwis Import and Export were dumped to concentrate on our own books only. The company name was now changed into Martin Leeuwis Publications.

Also, both Ton van Andel and Martin Leeuwis left the Royal Netherlands Air Force. Ton retired and became busier than ever before and Martin joined KLM to become a captain on Boeing B737.

Much sooner than expected the second printing of "Say again" was necessary and as questions about more books were asked we started working on successors. And keeping all books in print!

At this moment, November 2009 our product range is:

"Say again" ninth printing, almost sold out

"Say no more"  third printing, sold out

"Say again + say no more" first combined printing

"Say when"  third printing

"Say how"  second printing

"Say coffee or tea"  second printing

"Say heading" first printing 

"SkyTeam" first printing

"Say something" first printing

"Good Landing" first printing

"Welkom bij de Luchtmacht" first printing, not for sale

"Going up, Sir" first printing

All these books (info at "saybooks") will be reprinted as long as there is demand. It is astonishing to see sales of "Say again" at a constant high level since 1982. With this big range of aviation humor books it even looks like we are a world leader in printed aviation humor, and the only publisher in the world specializing on this subject .

Not bad for a company that was started as a part-time hobby, to avoid paying to much tax......