@MayorEmanuel To Live On Your Coffee Table, Forever

By Kim Bellware in News on Mar 25, 2011 8:20PM

Well that was fast. Dan Sinker, the man behind the @MayorEmanuel twitter stream announced today that Scribner press will be publishing his tweets as the fake Rahm Emanuel in book form.

Sarah Weinman, news editor for Publishers Marketplace, actually beat Sinker to the punch of announcing the news, tweeting earlier today,

"Scribner will publish the @MayorEmanuel tweets by @DanSinker in book form, with @biz writing the foreword."

Sinker, for his part, will write some additional annotations for the book, tweeting "Annotations will be to help contextualize the story, not overshadow it."

Since outing himself to The Atlantic in February, Sinker has been donated cash to worthy causes, made the media rounds and even met the man himself, making this latest announcement seem all but inevitable.

We readily cop to reading (and enjoying) Sinker's @MayorEmanuel feed during the campaign, but were admittedly a twinge disappointed that he didn't (or, understandably, perhaps couldn't) keep @MayorEmanuel's identify to himself. If Sinker can make some decent coin off of the book, more power to him, truly. Still, since the @MayorEmanuel idea was wickedly clever throughout its run, we had simply hoped for something equally novel if the Twitter stream were to be preserved for posterity in a non-Twitter form. The progression of Twitter feeds and Tumblogs-to-books (a la Shit My Dad Says, Awkward Family Photos and Hipster Puppies) has gotten a little too predicable for us to be excited about @MayorEmanuel's 1,955 tweets printed in hardcover.

Hopefully Sinker will find a way, apart from his reported annotations, to make the dead tree version of @MayorEmanuel as fun and relevant as the feed. In the meantime, we'll continue with our vain wish to see something more inventive come of a meme than just another glossy coffee table book.

To all the young scribes who have been dutifully toiling away on their novel: Just give up now. We've seen the future of books, and it's a dog in Wayfarers.