9/11 Book Glut

As someone with a hand in two different 9/11 books, I am going to ignore the following report:

Veteran New York City fireman John McCole has faced many challenges in his career but he is now undertaking a particularly daunting task: getting people to read his book about September 11.

In the year since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that killed 3,000 people, publishers have put out several hundred related books.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, the premier showcase for the publishing industry, experts say the market for such books, especially for commemorative editions and tomes on heroism and patriotism, is saturated and fading fast.

All of this is bad news for McCole, who was in Frankfurt to promote his book “The Second Tower is Down.”

“A lot of times it’s going to be a therapeutic type of thing,” McCole, 42, said in explaining why he wanted to add to the long list of September 11 books. “I wanted to get something out that deals with how I dealt with what happened, emotionally and also physically and spiritually.”

Dressed in his ceremonial firefighter’s uniform, McCole explained that he only arrived at the scene after the second of the two World Trade Center towers had collapsed.

“I found a colleague I got promoted with,” he said of the scene of destruction. “He was on top of a pile of rubble and I looked at him and I did not recognize him.”

“The day just went on like that,” he said. “I knew 40 or 50 guys who died that day.”

FLOOD OF BOOKS

McCole is one of several fireman to pen a memoir around September 11, and a plethora of other related books came out in the United States ahead of the first anniversary last month.

Networks CBS, CNN and others have issued DVDs of their September 11 images, and many media organizations, including Reuters, have put out photo books or compilations of articles.

“In May I counted more than 200 titles in some way related to September 11,” said Nancy Stewart, lead buyer for Ingram Books, a large American wholesaler. “The numerous similar titles kind of cannibalized each other.”

Sounds like it’s a good thing I work slowly.