When Reedy Press suffered a warehouse fire that destroyed 200,000 books last November, nearly every copy of St. Louis: An Illustrated Timeline was wiped out, save for a few that its author, historian Carol Ferring Shepley, was storing in the back of her car. It felt like time not for just a second printing of the book, which goes back to Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau, but for a new edition, out now.
Shepley finished the first in August 2014, right before Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, and protests intensified the Black Lives Matter movement here and across the country. To begin writing about Ferguson for the second edition, which she says was “very difficult to wrap my mind around,” Shepley started reading every St. Louis Post-Dispatch report from August 9 to September 24, then The New York Times’ and Washington Post’s reporting. “And then I walked around a long time just thinking about it,” Shepley says.
In the second edition, she’s included an entire section with points on what happened the afternoon of August 9, 2014; the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson; and the Ferguson Commission’s Forward Through Ferguson report. Other updates to the original: David Steward, founder of World Wide Technology, the country’s largest African-American–owned company, has his own spread. The Cortex Innovation Community’s a full page now. (So important to the future of the city,” she says.) Shepley has also expanded the 1904 World’s Fair section to 20 pages, with new information pulled from a friend’s inherited copies of The World’s Fair Bulletin—perhaps her favorite part of researching the second edition.
