Essex has published Building Commerce, a 150th-anniversary book for Missouri-based Commerce Bank. The 144-page book, created largely for a readership of employees and retirees, shareholders, customers, community leaders and other VIPs, tells the story of the Woods and Kemper families and how they turned a single banking office in Kansas City in 1865 into a super-community bank with 350 offices across the central United States, from Ohio and Tennessee west to the front range of the Rocky Mountains and from Illinois south to Texas. A central objective was to convey the essence of the bank's connections with its employees, customers and communities, and in doing so, the book reminds readers that, although Commerce has reinvented itself many times and undertaken more than 40 mergers and acquisitions, it continues to do business with the same values on which it was founded: strength, self-reliance, industriousness, trust, a deep sense that community matters and that sustainable success is built on long-term relationships.