Cahners Publishing had grown to 90 magazine titles by the time of Cahner's death, the best-known being "Variety" and "Publishers Weekly". The company was headquartered in the Boston suburb of Newton. The first Cahners magazine, "Modern Materials Handling", is still published today by Peerless Media, a B2B media company located in Framingham, MA. Cahners and his wife Helene became major philanthropists in Boston. There is a Cabot-Cahners room in Boston's Symphony Hall, a Cahners Theater in the Boston Museum of Science, and a Cahners Hall at Northeastern University. The Cahners-Rabb Professorship is an endowed chair at the Harvard Business School, and there is an endowed chair in Cahner's name for a cellist's position in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Cahners was a Trustee of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Helene Rabb Cahners chaired the Board of Trustees at Westbrook College, and was a Trustee of Mt. Holyoke College, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and numerous Boston-area hospitals. Reed Business Information dispenses the Norman L. Cahners Life-Time Achievement Award in recognition of the "outstanding, creative use of the business press in the marketing of products and services". This is one of the prestigious CEBA (Creative Excellence in Business Advertising) Awards. Recipients have included the CEO's of Sony Corporation of America, Time-Warner, General Electric, and NBC. A second Norman L. Cahners Award is presented by the Materials Handling Industry of America through their Material Handling Education Foundation. Cahners himself won the organization's Reed Apple Award. In 1970 Cahners was named "Man of the Year" by The Advertising Club of New York.