A hot cup of book

Three Forks couple relay coffee's story in word and photo

By MIKE MCINALLY of the Missoulian

 Daniel and Linda Rice Lorenzetti didn't spend five years working on their "Birth of Coffee" project so that it would be ignored.

 So this husband-and-wife team - he's a photographer and she's a writer - made sure that their story about coffee-growing countries and the people who make their living from the production of coffee could be told in a number of different ways.

There's the book, "The Birth of Coffee," which combines Daniel's photographs with Linda's text. There's the related collection of photographs by Daniel, which will travel to museums and sites over the next few years. And there's the Web site (www.birthofcoffee.com), which represents yet another way to get the word out about the project.

 And there will be events such as the one that brings the Lorenzettis to Missoula on Friday, when they host a coffee tasting and talk about "The Birth of Coffee," in all its different forms, at the Montana Festival of the Book.

"It took five years of our lives to do this project," Daniel Lorenzetti said. "We want people to see the work."

 The Lorenzettis, who spend half of the year on the Three Forks-area ranch that has been in Linda Lorenzetti's family for generations, came up with the idea for "The Birth of Coffee" during a trip to Indonesia, where they visited a coffee plantation and tasted, for the first time, a just-picked coffee cherry. Doing additional research on the literacy legacy of coffee, it struck them that there had been little written about the people who pick and produce coffee, the people who make their living in Third World countries by starting coffee on the journey that finally ends in your mug. So that's why "The Birth of Coffee" is packed with images and stories of those people, and includes stops in Ethiopia, Yemen, Indonesia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Kenya.

 Their guts told them they had a project that had some commercial potential: "We knew when we decided to do this project, we knew it was saleable," Daniel Lorenzetti said.

But that didn't necessarily make the sale any easier.

 Since it was their first book, the Lorenzettis knew they were unlikely to get an agent. So they prepared a detailed mockup of the book and started shopping it around to publishing houses. The response, they said, was good, but they quickly learned that that initial response didn't guarantee anything.

 "What you learn," said Daniel, "is that it doesn't matter if you have a good idea or a bad idea. It just has to fit somebody's plan."

 Finally, the book fit the plan of Random House, which published the book under its Clarkson Potter imprint.

 The book is the first major project for the Lorenzettis' "Image Expedition," a nonprofit organization that aims to apply the same words-and-pictures documentary approach used in "The Birth of Coffee" to a variety of other topics. The next project from the Image Expedition is likely to be an in-depth examination of Yellowstone National Park.

 But if you're ready to devote years of your life to a single topic, you better be sure it's a good topic.

 "The Yellowstone project will be successful, in my mind, just because it's Yellowstone," Daniel Lorenzetti said, and Linda added: "We choose our subjects carefully." The decision to tackle coffee, for example, "didn't just happen overnight," she said. "We've had other ideas that just didn't develop. The ones that develop are the ones that keep surfacing."

 Meanwhile, the Lorenzettis tackle other work to make their livings - he's a Web designer and she works as a free-lance writer. And there's still work to do on "The Birth of Coffee" project.

 In Missoula, they'll talk about the book, the photos, the coffee. And they'll talk about the peculiar stresses that sometime erupt when your working partner is your spouse.

Does the fact that you're arguing with your significant other ease the sting of those disagreements?

 Linda Lorenzetti laughed as she pondered the question.

"Most days," she said. "I wouldn't say that's always the rule."