Daniel Frank, director of fine-art publications at Meridian Printing in East Greenwich, was apprehensive when the call came from a New York publisher asking Meridian to print a photo book chronicling the events of Sept. 11.
Just days after the terrorist attacks, with the nation’s shock slipping into grief, the last thing anyone at Meridian wanted to do was attach the company’s name to an opportunistic publication.
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“I had some mixed feelings, because I was afraid it might be a sensational book,” Frank said. “But the more we talked to the publisher and the photo agency, we realized this was a good thing to do and even therapeutic on some levels.”
Therapeutic because Meridian’s employees – like workers at businesses across the country – were yearning for a way to help. Here was their chance: Meridian agreed to do the job at cost, with what would have been the $30,000 markup going to The New York Times 9/11 Neediest Fund.
Over the next month – a blink of an eye in the book-publishing world – the publisher, powerHouse Books, pulled together designers, bookbinders and other vendors to donate time and resources to the book. powerHouse handed the project to Meridian on Oct. 19.
For the next 11 days, Meridian’s newest, fastest press never stopped whirring. Press workers logged 70-hour weeks, donating all their weekend overtime pay – including double time for Sundays – to the relief fund.
Meridian hit its deadline, wrapping up the run on Oct. 29, a Sunday. Under normal circumstances, the job probably would have taken a month or more.
“It’s something that we didn’t mind doing,” said pressman Kevin Reph, who worked both weekends during the book’s run. “It didn’t matter what kind of hours we were putting in. It was enough just knowing that we were ‘gonna’ be raising money for people that had gone through a lot.”
A fateful gathering of some of the world’s best documentary photographers provided the impetus for the book.
Magnum Photos, an agency based in New York City, has about 60 free-lance photographers scattered throughout the world. But during the week of Sept. 11, about a dozen of them happened to be meeting at the agency’s office in New York City.
When the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center, it didn’t take them long to figure out what to do.
“At first, I wasn’t really experiencing what was happening,” wrote photographer Adam Wiseman in one of the book’s plainspoken, heartfelt passages accompanying the photographers’ images. “I really feel I was hiding behind my camera. It was my camera that was bearing witness.”
In the hours and days that followed the twin towers’ collapse, Magnum photographers and interns dispersed around ground zero and farther reaches of the city. The end result, “New York September 11,” is a 144-page, hardbound book filled with some of the most gripping, poignant images to come from the tragedy.
Magnum came up with the book idea almost immediately. Agency directors that week called Craig Cohen, powerHouse’s associate publisher, to pitch the idea.
The publisher’s small staff had just returned to its office on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, less than a mile from the site of the World Trade Center. Employees had been kept away for three days by the throngs of National Guard troops that clogged Varick Street, which was supposed to have served as a main thoroughfare for casualties being taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital.
“We started asking ourselves, ‘What can we do as a company?'” said Cohen. “Well, we make art books, and nobody needs those right now. Then the phone rang and it was Magnum.”
powerHouse committed to the project, but Cohen knew it would be tough to convince nearly a dozen vendors to donate their money and resources on such short notice.
“We needed a printer that we could depend on for a tight turnaround, large quantity and high quality,” Cohen said. “And we needed a first partner, one with a prominent reputation that would get other suppliers to follow suit. The very first call I made was to Meridian.”
From its nondescript printing facility on South County Trail in East Greenwich, Meridian’s 90-person staff has printed high-end books for some of the world’s most famous photographers and artists, including Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon and Annie Liebowitz. The company a few months ago was chosen by the Ansel Adams Foundation as one of only two printers to reprint the famous outdoor photographer’s photos for a 100-year anniversary book.
About 30 Meridian employees worked directly on the Sept. 11 book, although just about everybody pitched in to accommodate the project on such a tight deadline.
“When (Frank) first brought us the project it was 25,000 (copies), so we thought we could fit it in,” said Meridian’s Chief Operating Officer Bob Nangle. “But the quantity went up to more than 100,000. And as other projects continued to come in, it made it very tough.”
Employees from every department helped flip and re-stack about a million press sheets for the Sept. 11 book. The pressroom juggled other projects to free up Meridian’s best press. Some of Meridian’s other clients agreed to extend their deadlines. Salespeople worked extra hours making sure the colors of the prints matched the proofs.
“Two of the photographers, Thomas Hoepker and Dennis Stock, came up on press,”(press run day) Frank said. “For the pressmen to realize that these were the guys that were down there at ground zero, and here they were at Meridian looking at their pictures, I think that gave people a sense of involvement and immediacy.”
The book also includes a handful of shots of the twin towers taken by Magnum photographers over the years. David Halberstam, a former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer prize-winning author and journalist, wrote the introduction.
Barnes & Noble will sell the book, which retails for $29.95. Part of the proceeds from the book – due out this week – will go to the New York Times 9/11 Neediest Fund. The donation could total $500,000, according to powerHouse.
