When I first paged through Paul Fusco's RFK Funeral Train - the trade edition published by Umbrage in 2000 - I felt a dreadful sense of deja vu for how wrong things had gone in 1968. The optimism of an age in which so many were committed to making the world a better place had been wiped out by the assassination of yet another charismatic leader.

Paul Fusco's photographs are remarkable on many levels. On my first reading, it was the overwhelming sense of loss that came through in the faces and gestures of the thousands of people lining the tracks to pay their respects. A collective sense of grief, experienced by people of all ages, races, and classes in these pictures gives a lie, if only for a short while, to the racial divide that Bobby Kennedy had worked so hard to bridge.

Above: Copyright Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos, from Paul Fusco: RFK (Aperture 2008).

Forty years later, Aperture is publishing a new edition, to be released next Thursday at a book signing with Magnum photographer Paul Fusco, at Danziger Projects. Along with the exhibition of Cibachrome prints is a display of the three editions of the book: a limited edition of 300 (Magnum Photos 1999); the first trade edition (Umbrage 2000) and the reissue (Aperture 2008), which includes another 70 images culled from the Library of Congress archive in addition to the originally published 53.

I asked Lesley Martin, Aperture's publisher and editor of both the new edition and the original, how the reissue came about. "In all frankness," she said, "it was James Danziger's idea. He was planning his show to commemorate the anniversary, and the book had fallen out of print. When we started talking about the project, we knew we wanted to add some of the outtakes that had been left out of the original edition.

"Paul knew that there were 'some' additional images at the Library of Congress," she continued. "He hadn't been able to get down there to check it out, so finally I got in touch with the LOC and was very surprised to learn that 'some' meant 'some 2,000' Kodachrome slides!"

At the time, Paul Fusco was a staff photographer for Look magazine. He was given a ticket and told to get on the train carrying Kennedy's body from New York to Arlington National Cemetery for burial on July 8, 1968. On the way to Penn Station, he stopped at the funeral in progress at St. Patrick's Cathedral. In an interview for Publishers Weekly, Fusco said, "I spent about 10 minutes taking photos at the funeral, then I had to get to the train. That was my assignment."

Once on the train, he said, "All I was thinking about was how to get access when we got to Arlington. Then, when the train emerged from beneath the Hudson, and I saw hundreds of people on the platform watching the train come slowly through - it went very slowly - I just opened the window and began to shoot." The magazine used only one of Fusco's photos - "not because they didn't like them," he said, "but because as a biweekly, Look was "a little behind on the story." So thousands of images Fusco shot that day remained unseen, and finally went to the LOC when the magazine folded in 1970.

For the new edition, said Lesley, "I went down again to the LOC and made the final cut over a two-day period. James Danziger had also visited the archive and had come back with digital snaps of his favorites, which dovetailed nicely with my favorites. There was an unbelievable amount of great stuff - Kodachrome slides, beautifully preserved given the pristine conditions at the LOC."

Paul Fusco: RFK (Aperture 2008), with essays by Vicki Goldberg, Norman Mailer (1923-2007}, and Evan Thomas; Tribute by Senator Edward M. Kennedy is being released at the exhibition opening and book signing at Danziger Projects, Thursday, September 4, 6:00 - 8:00 pm