The Hill News

The fake Rahm Emanuel Twitter is coming back â€" this time in book form.

Columbia College of Chicago journalism professor Dan Sinker, the man behind the infamous satirical @MayorEmanuel Twitter, has signed a book deal with Simon & Schuster imprint Scriber. 

The deal was announced, fittingly, on Twitter by Sarah Weinman, the news editor for Publishers Marketplace.

“Scribner will publish the @MayorEmanuel tweets by @DanSinker in book form, with @biz writing the foreword.” The @biz account belongs to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

Throughout the former White House chief of staff's successful campaign for mayor of Chicago, the fake @MayorEmanuel parodied the real Emanuel's reputation for profanity and irritability. The fake Twitter began to take shape as sort of a cross between a comic book and serialized cartoon strip. The fake Emanuel, accompanied by a fictional former White House senior adviser David Axelrod as well as Hamb! one the dog and Quaxelrod the duck, went on a series of adventures, sometimes paralleling what the real Rahm Emanuel was doing during on the mayor campaign trail. For example, when it looked like Emanuel would be kicked out of the race because of a legal challenge to his residency, the fake Emanuel tweeted about burning all of his possessions in a fit of panic.

The Twitter ended shortly after the real Emanuel was elected mayor.
 
The Twitter, then anonymously written, quickly gained a wide following first for its humor but also for the story. For much of the Twitter's existence, it had more followers than the real Emanuel. Currently the fake Twitter has 48,000 followers and the real Emanuel's Twitter has 15,000.

Numerous media outlets tried to uncover the Twitter handle's author to no avail until The Atlantic finally landed an interview and revealed Sinker. Since then Sinker has been featured in more profiles and appeared on The C! olbert Report but has not resurrected the Twitter.