Editing down more than 300 historical obituaries of well more than half a million words to fit within the covers of a book, even one as hefty as this, takes some doing, and it was done largely and expertly by a platoon of editors, all of them lately retired from The New York Times after long and successful careers with the newspaper. (Indeed, their cumulative length of service probably exceeds the number of years that The Times itself has been in operation: 165 and counting.) So a warm thanks to Constance Rosenblum, Dave Smith, David Stout, Paul Winfield, David Corcoran and Charles Strum.
Finding and selecting photographs from a trove of hundreds (if not thousands) of them was also a challenge, and it was ably met by The Times photo editors Evan Sklar and William P. O’Donnell, as well as by Jeff Roth, who provided research as the head of The Times’s archive known as “the morgue.” The striking results of their labor can be seen throughout this book.
Any ambitious endeavor like this almost invariably has a guiding spirit, and at The Times it was Alex Ward, the editorial director of book projects. The book would plainly not have happened without his enthusiasm and dedication in seeing it through to completion.
At Black Dog & Leventhal, the senior editor Lisa Tenaglia was the patient and creative guiding force in realizing J.P. Leventhal’s original vision for this book.
She was backed by a superb team: Ankur Ghosh in book production, Mike Olivo in managing editorial, and Neil DeYoung, Marcy Haggag and Lukas Fauset in designing and developing the impressively rich and deep website of historical obituaries that accompanies the book. Their work, aided by Evan Sandhaus, a technology director at The Times, helped make “The Book of the Dead” such a singular publishing enterprise—one that only begins between these covers before reaching even more widely into the past.