Room for Maxwell in the gutter

I managed the Reuters annual report for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when money was sloshing around the place and the financial results were very good.

The powers that be agreed to a new, bolder report design to reflect the company's financial success, and that design included flipping it to a horizontal format. As a result, the photo of the board was going to run across a double-page spread. I set up the photo shoot on the seventh floor of 85 Fleet Street, just before lunch on the day of a board meeting. The directors filed into the room in a jolly mood.

At that point, Robert Maxwell was a director, but he had failed to turn up for the meeting. I huddled with the photographer and we agreed that we'd separate the directors into two groups in the room, with space between them where we could drop Maxwell in via photoshop (or its 1989 equivalent), as if he was standing among them. Of course, we also had to leave room for where the two pages come together at the binding.

The photographer started shooting, but the directors were laughing and talking and we had a hard time getting them to maintain that space in the middle. So the photographer shouted: "Please, gentlemen, we must leave room for Mr Maxwell in the gutter!" - “gutter" being the term printers use for that middle space in a book. The directors took it a different way, of course, and they erupted in laughter. And that's the photo we used for the annual report.

Maxwell, by the way, never made himself available for us. And within months he was dead. ■