Dogs in Elk: binding and source

31 Jan 2025 - 5 minute read

I found the original post of Dogs in Elk, and formatted and bound it as a book!¹

At Christmas I gave this book to my parents, who must have shown me the original sometime when I was in high school. We passed it around the room after everyone opened presents. Each family member opened the book with a mild level of interest, then slowly escalated to cry-laughing while murmuring things like “oh noooo” and “what!!”: A real pleasure. An improvement on texting everyone the link.

Dogs in Elk is a 25-year-old viral dog story. It was very widely forwarded by email, which was the style at the time. There are a few sources that come up when you search for it. The version on web.mit.edu² claims it was a rec.pets newsgroup post, but others accurately note that it comes from the Salon.com Tabletalk forum. That forum existed for 16 years, but it was taken offline with little notice in 2011. So the Dogs in Elk original disappeared from the web.

I found it again! Archive Team scraped all the public threads from Tabletalk once the shutdown announcement was made,³ so I downloaded the archive and found the thread, deep in the corpus.

Here is the section of the forum thread between the start and the end of the saga (A more focused PDF is later in this post). To find it yourself, you can download the Table Talk dump from its page on archive.org. Unzip the file, then traverse the folders Table Talk / Private Life / Private Life Attic. Open the Canine Conundrums file, and search for #1318. There are MANY more dog stories there for those who are patient.⁴

Occasional posts seem to be missing from that scrape. I noticed that #1333 was plot-relevant and missing, and copied it into my book files (and the HTML version above) from the web.mit.edu source.

Finding the original thread allowed me to choose additional posts that the copypasters of old left out. I chose to add a little more context, and prolong the suspense of the Rosh Hashanah weekend a bit. Also, with the original in hand, I could copy its formatting. I decided I wanted to give my book the feeling of a copy that someone printed out at work and brought home. Probably how I first saw it. So I kept the first page of the forum thread pretty much intact, log-in link and all.

For the endpapers I chose a commercial marbled paper that felt 90% decorative and 10% intestinal:

Here is a PDF of my formatted version, laid out for 3.75 x 5.5 inch pages.⁵ I took a lot of care in paginating it so that most questions and replies were fully visible on facing pages. I made the title pages with figlet. One who’s inclined could take this PDF over to Bookbinder JS and arrange it into signatures for binding.

There were several details of the book that I could improve. The most obvious is that the cover boards warped—I think it’s probably because the lovely endpapers don’t have as much strength as the bookcloth.⁶ A couple things are crooked. Also, I decided that since each post was numbered, there was no need for page numbers. This basically worked, but did cause me mild grief and light lamentations while I was sorting out the signatures into their right order. But overall I’m extremely happy with it as my first case-bound book! I’m grateful that I got to take a bookbinding class, and I’m looking forward to many more projects. Here’s this one with a couple others:

If you finish this post and wish to read another dog story, I recommend this one. If you are still unsatisfied, click the “family lore” tag at the bottom of that text.

1. This led to a lot of conversations last fall that started “So what are you up to?” — “Do you remember Dogs in Elk?”⁷ ↩

2. By the way, is it just me or does MIT have so much swagger for sticking with “web.mit.edu” for all these years? None of this www tridubs stuff. It’s so old-timey and pure. ↩

3. I ran across a former denizen of Tabletalk, who said that many of them had migrated to a specific other forum. I asked, and she was generally aware that a scrape was available on archive.org. So that’s good. ↩

4. I learned just now that Gus Pong was a New Guinea Singing Dog. I had glossed over when Anne V mentioned the dogs singing from inside the carcass, but it’s actually very specific. Also, Anne has such a compelling narrative voice! Amazing every time. ↩

5. This book ended up printed much larger than that—maybe I’ll make a smaller copy on nicer paper sometime. ↩

6. There are apparently a lot of details in getting book covers not to warp - the papers that wrap the front and back both expand with the wet glue or paste. Then you stick them on, and they contract as they dry. The tension has to match (including what direction it’s pulling). I’m still working on absorbing the fine points from a Keith Smith book. ↩

7. My wife relishes it when I have to take that sort of hard conversational left turn to answer a seemingly innocuous question. This is why she made me tee shirts emblazoned “Nautical Deborah,” “Astral Deborah,” and “Terrestrial Deborah.”⁸ ↩

8. So, you know the Suez Canal? Remember when the Evergiven got wedged across it a few years ago? Well I remember looking at Marine Traffic while that was on, and idly clicking on a few ships that were anchored, waiting to pass through. One of them was named Nautical Deborah, which I thought was great. As I was relaying this important information to someone, we realized that if there’s a Nautical Deborah, then there should really be Deborahs of all these other domains. My wife adores followthrough as a form of humor, and as I mentioned, loves it when I have to explain things. Accordingly, there are tee shirts. ↩