Dog Pond Press: A Virtual Book Store
2004 - 2006

This fourth book in the Stories Carved in Stone series extends the scope outside of West Springfield, Massachusetts, which was the genesis of this project. Together these books present a full picture of the gravestone carvers, the mourning practices, and the families who lived and died here. Gravestone fans and genealogists alike will find much to explore in these old cemeteries.

Order your copy of Stories Carved in Stonetoday for just $17.95!!

Dad and Leenuts is the story of an Italian-American family that has serious problems with their command of the English language. While they never do anything wrong their butchering of the language leads to hilarious mix-ups, misunderstandings, and comic arrests time and time again.

Meet Dad, who has been in the United States since 1963, but whose English has never improved. He is a cheapskate and a penny pincher, still driving the first station wagon ever made.

Meet Leenuts, dad’s wife, who is a religious zealot and has given everything up for Jesus except her bible, cross, and robe, and annoyingly sends Evangelical ministers lots of money.

Meet Alpo, the thirty-four year old son who went to college to become a communist. He’s been in college for 17 years, can’t hold a job, and his penny pinching father is annoyed to no end about all the money spent on a college education and his son just keeps getting stupider.


Order your copy of Dad and Leenuts today for just $13.95!

More Background On DogPondPress.net

DogPondPress.net was the online home of Dog Pond Press, a small subsidy publisher and virtual bookstore based in West Springfield, Massachusetts. During the first decade of the 2000s, the company occupied an interesting place between traditional publishing and the rapidly expanding world of author-financed and independent publishing. It offered writers a way to turn manuscripts into commercially available paperback books while simultaneously operating an online store where readers could discover titles unlikely to receive prominent placement in conventional bookstores.

Dog Pond Press was closely associated with Western Massachusetts. Its mailing address was listed as Dog Pond Press, c/o eBizOpz, Box 27, West Springfield, Massachusetts 01090, and the company identified itself as a division of eBizOpz. Its regional identity became even more apparent through its publishing catalog. Some of its most enduring books dealt with the history, cemeteries, people, institutions, and gravestone art of communities along the Connecticut River in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Although Dog Pond Press never became a major national publishing house, some of the books carrying its imprint developed a surprisingly durable afterlife. They have been cited in historical research, preservation resources, genealogical writing, reference works, and articles about Western Massachusetts history. That legacy makes DogPondPress.net an interesting example of how a very small Internet-era publisher could preserve specialized knowledge that might otherwise have struggled to reach print.

What DogPondPress.net Was

The website described Dog Pond Press as a "subsidy publishing house." Under this model, authors contributed financially toward the production of their books rather than going through the conventional process in which a publisher acquired a manuscript and assumed virtually all of the financial risk.

Dog Pond Press presented the arrangement as a partnership with writers. Its stated objective was to keep setup costs comparatively low while providing authors with favorable royalties. It particularly welcomed writers whose manuscripts had not been accepted by larger publishing companies.

This philosophy placed Dog Pond Press in the early-2000s transition between older vanity-press models and what would eventually become today's enormous self-publishing industry.

The company was not simply selling printing. Its basic publishing package included an ISBN, barcode, paperback production, cover, author photograph and biography, complimentary books and efforts to make the finished title discoverable through important bookselling channels.

At the same time, DogPondPress.net functioned as a bookstore. Visitors could purchase the publisher's own books as well as browse new and used books. The site tried to reproduce some of the personality of visiting a physical bookstore, describing the distinctive smell of books, crisp pages of new volumes and the mystery of wondering who had previously read a used book.

That personal writing style distinguished DogPondPress.net from the increasingly standardized e-commerce sites appearing during the same period.

Location and the Importance of West Springfield

Dog Pond Press's West Springfield location was more than a mailing address. Geography influenced much of its catalog.

West Springfield sits on the western side of the Connecticut River opposite Springfield in Hampden County. Nearby communities include Agawam, Holyoke, Chicopee, Westfield and Longmeadow, while the Connecticut state line is only a relatively short distance south. This location placed the press in the heart of the Connecticut River Valley—the geographic area that became the subject of several Dog Pond Press books.

The region has a long colonial and industrial history. Communities that are separate municipalities today once shared political, religious and economic connections. Cemeteries became unusually valuable records of that development because their stones preserve family names, occupations, artistic traditions, religious symbolism and evidence of settlement patterns.

Dog Pond Press found a distinctive publishing niche in precisely this material.

Rather than trying to compete with large publishers for mass-market fiction or celebrity books, it published highly localized works whose natural audiences included historical societies, genealogists, cemetery researchers, preservationists and people with family connections to Western Massachusetts and northern Connecticut.

The Stories Carved in Stone Series

The most historically durable books associated with Dog Pond Press are the Stories Carved in Stone volumes by Rusty Clark and Bob Clark.

Rusty Clark's West Springfield, Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone was published by Dog Pond Press in 2004. Bibliographic sources identify it as a 168-page book with ISBN 978-0-9755362-0-9.

The book was designed as much more than a cemetery directory. It examined old burial grounds as historical documents, exploring gravestone carvers, symbolism, burial traditions and the people represented by individual monuments. Readers could effectively walk through cemeteries while learning to interpret what they saw.

The West Springfield volume covered five old cemeteries and reached back to the period of the Agawam Plantation. It included maps, gravestone photographs and information intended to help readers identify the work of Connecticut Valley stone carvers.

That combination made the book useful to several overlapping audiences. Genealogists could search for ancestors. Local-history enthusiasts could learn about early residents. Art historians and gravestone enthusiasts could examine carving styles. Visitors could use the material as a field guide.

Rusty Clark subsequently expanded the concept geographically.

Agawam, Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone appeared in 2005. Bibliographic records list the volume at 182 pages and identify Dog Pond Press as its publisher.

Holyoke, Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone followed in 2006. The approximately 196-page volume explored more than two centuries of Holyoke-area history through its burial grounds. It also placed the cemeteries within the larger story of Holyoke's transformation from a farming community into one of America's important planned industrial cities.

Bob Clark extended the series southward with Enfield, Connecticut: Stories Carved in Stone, published by Dog Pond Press in 2006. The 272-page book approached historic cemeteries as outdoor museums and considered gravestones from several perspectives, including genealogy, art, geology and local history.

The series eventually extended further. A Westfield, Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone volume by Bob Clark appeared in 2008 and has subsequently been cited by genealogical researchers.

Together, these books created something resembling a regional reference library of historic Connecticut River Valley burial grounds.

Recognition of the Cemetery Books

One of the strongest indications of Dog Pond Press's lasting importance comes not from the publisher's own promotional material but from preservation organizations and later researchers.

Preservation Massachusetts has recommended the Stories Carved in Stone books among resources dealing with gravestone imagery, carvers and monument styles. Its burial-ground resource material describes the books by Rusty and Bob Clark as particularly useful to researchers attempting to identify gravestone carvers in Western Massachusetts.

That is significant recognition for publications from such a small press.

The series appears alongside established works on Puritan gravestone art, New England gravestones and cemetery research. By 2012, Preservation Massachusetts noted volumes covering Agawam, Holyoke, Enfield, West Springfield and Westfield.

The books have also found their way into scholarly and historical citations.

Rusty Clark's West Springfield volume was cited in the Historical Journal of Massachusetts in research concerning Black families in Springfield and Hampden County between 1650 and 1865.

It has also been cited in historical discussions of Luke Day, the West Springfield figure associated with Shays' Rebellion.

Perhaps more unexpectedly, MassMutual has cited Clark's West Springfield, Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone in articles about the history of the insurance company and its founders. That demonstrates how a specialized cemetery and local-history book can become a source for broader institutional history.

The Holyoke volume has similarly been cited in reference material dealing with people, businesses and historical developments in Holyoke.

Bob Clark's Enfield book appears in historical documentation beyond the book trade as well. A Connecticut historic-preservation document, for example, includes Enfield, Connecticut: Stories Carved in Stone in its bibliography.

For a tiny regional publisher, this continuing citation record is arguably more meaningful than conventional literary awards.

Badges of Honor and West Springfield Police History

Another important Dog Pond Press publication was Badges of Honor: The History of the West Springfield Police Department by Phyllis A. Austin-Bertera.

Austin-Bertera was unusually well positioned to write such a history. She was a West Springfield native who served on the town's Board of Selectmen and had responsibilities connected with the police department. She became the first woman elected to the West Springfield Board of Selectmen, serving from 1981 to 1984 and later returning for another term in the late 1990s.

She was also recognized as a town historian.

Badges of Honor traced the West Springfield Police Department from its nineteenth-century beginnings into the modern era. Rather than simply listing chiefs and dates, the work drew on the author's familiarity with municipal government and the department.

The book's continued availability provides independent confirmation of Dog Pond Press's role as publisher. Google Books/Google Play records identify Badges of Honor as a Dog Pond Press title published in December 2006. The electronic edition is listed at approximately 120 pages.

Austin-Bertera's later obituary also specifically remembered her as the author of Badges of Honor and described the book as a history of the West Springfield Police Department containing extensive information about the town itself.

The title therefore fits neatly into Dog Pond Press's strongest publishing niche: preserving community history that might have been considered too geographically specialized for a large commercial publisher.

Other Books and a Broader Catalog

Dog Pond Press was not exclusively a historical publisher.

Its catalog also included Dad and Leenuts by Steve Ala, a comedy centered on an Italian-American family and the misunderstandings arising from its characters' unconventional use of English.

The presence of a comedic family story alongside police history and cemetery field guides demonstrates that Dog Pond Press was willing to publish outside a narrowly defined subject category.

The connecting principle was not genre. It was accessibility for authors.

Dog Pond Press's stated publishing philosophy was that worthwhile manuscripts could exist even when conventional publishers declined them. The company offered another route into print.

That was a particularly relevant proposition in the early 2000s. Print-on-demand technology, desktop publishing, Internet bookstores and online distribution were beginning to dismantle some of the barriers that had historically made book publishing extremely expensive.

What It Cost to Publish Through Dog Pond Press

The economics advertised by Dog Pond Press provide an unusually useful snapshot of small-press publishing in the mid-2000s.

Its basic "Starter Kit" was advertised at $395.

For that price, an author could receive a trade paperback with a color cover selected from templates, an International Standard Book Number, a barcode, an author photograph and biography on the back cover, and ten complimentary copies.

Dog Pond Press also advertised wholesale availability of additional copies and submission of the book to Bowker's Books in Print database, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Royalties were to be paid quarterly when the amount due exceeded $25.

Additional services were priced separately. Interior image scanning was offered at $4.50 per image. Data entry from typed manuscripts cost $2.50 per page. A PDF copy of the book supplied on CD-ROM cost $65. Custom cover design started at $300.

The standard price assumed a text-only trade paperback of up to 104 pages with dimensions of approximately 5.25 by 8.25 inches.

These details help date the business technologically. A PDF supplied on CD-ROM as a paid add-on makes perfect sense in the mid-2000s but would seem unusual today, when digital files are routinely transferred through cloud storage or email.

The Virtual Bookstore Experience

DogPondPress.net was also characteristic of an earlier generation of online retailing.

The site did not attempt to imitate a giant bookstore. Instead, it emphasized personality and the pleasure of browsing.

Customers who did not want to place an online order could apparently print an order page and pay by check or money order. The website supplied customer-service contact information and a published return policy.

Books could generally be returned within ten days of receipt if they remained in salable condition, although a 25-percent restocking fee applied and customers were responsible for return shipping. Gift-shop merchandise was treated differently and was generally non-returnable unless damaged.

Dog Pond Press also stated that customer information would not be sold or shared. Transactions appeared on credit-card statements under the eBizOpz name because Dog Pond Press identified itself as a division of that operation.

These mundane details are historically revealing. They show a small business attempting to build trust with Internet shoppers at a time when many consumers were still becoming comfortable entering payment information online.

Ownership and Business Structure

The clearest surviving description of the business relationship is Dog Pond Press's own statement that it was a division of eBizOpz.

The site used the West Springfield mailing address "c/o eBizOpz," and customers were advised that purchases would appear under the eBizOpz name on their credit-card statements.

Publicly accessible sources located for this history do not provide enough reliable evidence to assign individual ownership of Dog Pond Press to a specific person without qualification. It is therefore safer to distinguish the documented business relationship from assumptions about who personally owned or controlled the operation.

What can be established is that Dog Pond Press operated as a West Springfield-based publishing imprint/business associated with eBizOpz and that books carrying the Dog Pond Press imprint were commercially published during the 2000s.

Popularity, Reviews and Reach

Dog Pond Press does not appear to have been a high-volume mass-market publisher, and there is no reliable evidence that DogPondPress.net ever attracted traffic comparable to major bookselling websites.

Its importance was more specialized.

Some of its books remain represented in Google's book ecosystem many years after publication. Stories Carved in Stone: Holyoke, Massachusetts, for example, has appeared with a five-star rating on Google Play Books, although from only one rating. Enfield, Connecticut: Stories Carved in Stone has appeared with a four-star rating, also based on a very small number of ratings. Badges of Honor likewise has appeared with a five-star rating based on one rating.

Such tiny samples should not be treated as statistically meaningful measures of reader opinion. They do, however, demonstrate that these books survived digitally long after their original publication period.

More persuasive evidence of reputation comes from specialist use. Preservation Massachusetts's recommendation of the cemetery series, scholarly citations and genealogical references demonstrate that at least part of the Dog Pond Press catalog reached the exact audience for which it was particularly valuable.

Audience

Dog Pond Press effectively served two audiences.

The first consisted of writers.

For authors who had completed manuscripts but could not—or did not want to—secure conventional publishing contracts, Dog Pond Press offered a relatively inexpensive path to a physical book carrying an ISBN and potentially appearing through major bookselling databases and retailers.

The second audience consisted of readers interested in subjects too specialized for mainstream publishing.

This was especially evident with the regional-history titles. Genealogists, cemetery researchers, local historians, descendants of early Connecticut River Valley families, gravestone-art enthusiasts and residents interested in their communities all had reasons to seek out the books.

The model worked particularly well for local history because a book does not need a national audience to be culturally valuable.

A detailed guide to five Western Massachusetts cemeteries might never become a national bestseller. Yet for a genealogist trying to identify an ancestor's gravestone, a preservationist identifying a stone carver or a historian reconstructing a local family, that same book can be exceptionally useful.

Cultural and Historical Significance

Dog Pond Press illustrates an important but easily overlooked function of small publishing houses: preserving knowledge that is commercially marginal but historically valuable.

Large publishing companies naturally favor books capable of reaching substantial markets. That economic logic leaves many local histories, genealogies, institutional histories and specialized reference works without an obvious publishing home.

Small presses can fill that gap.

The Stories Carved in Stone books demonstrate the point particularly well. Cemeteries are vulnerable historical resources. Gravestones weather, inscriptions disappear, monuments are damaged, landscapes change and family knowledge is lost.

Photographing stones, identifying their carvers, recording inscriptions, mapping burial grounds and connecting monuments with documentary history transforms fragile physical evidence into a more durable historical record.

Dog Pond Press helped put that information into published form.

The fact that later historians, preservation organizations, genealogists and even a major Massachusetts institution such as MassMutual have cited books carrying the Dog Pond Press imprint shows how specialized local publishing can continue producing value long after the original commercial life of a website has ended.

Dog Pond Press in the History of Independent Publishing

Dog Pond Press also represents a transitional stage in publishing history.

When its website was active in the 2000s, Amazon was already transforming book retailing, but today's frictionless self-publishing environment had not fully matured. Kindle Direct Publishing did not yet dominate independent publishing, e-books were not yet the default alternative to print for independent authors, and producing a professional-looking paperback still required more specialized assistance than it generally does today.

Companies such as Dog Pond Press provided a bridge.

They supplied ISBNs, barcodes, cover production, book formatting, physical copies and access to bibliographic and retail channels. In effect, they bundled together services that modern authors can now obtain individually through online platforms.

The $395 starter package therefore tells part of a larger technological story. It belongs to the period when Internet distribution and digital printing were beginning to make small-scale publishing economically practical but before authors could manage nearly every part of the process themselves through a single online dashboard.

What DogPondPress.net Is Best Remembered For

DogPondPress.net is best understood not simply as an old bookstore website but as the surviving digital footprint of a small regional publisher.

Its most distinctive legacy lies in three areas.

First, it provided independent authors with an alternative route to publication.

Second, it operated an early virtual bookstore that tried to retain the warmth and personality associated with browsing a physical bookshop.

Most importantly, it published works preserving Western Massachusetts and Connecticut River Valley history.

The Stories Carved in Stone series gave readers a way to understand historic cemeteries as outdoor archives containing genealogy, folk art, religious symbolism, social history and evidence of early New England communities. Badges of Honor preserved the institutional history of the West Springfield Police Department through the work of a writer who had firsthand experience in town government.

Those books gave Dog Pond Press a cultural footprint considerably larger than the scale of the publishing operation itself might suggest.

Legacy

The most revealing way to judge Dog Pond Press today is not by how large its website once was or how many books it sold during a particular year. Those figures are difficult to reconstruct and may never have been publicly reported.

Its legacy is visible instead in the persistence of its books.

Titles published under the Dog Pond Press imprint continue to appear in bibliographies, preservation resources, genealogical research, historical articles and digital book catalogs. Researchers investigating gravestone carvers, early Western Massachusetts families, Shays' Rebellion, Holyoke history, Enfield history and even the origins of MassMutual have encountered information preserved in Dog Pond Press publications.

That is an impressive afterlife for a small publishing operation.

DogPondPress.net captures a moment when the Internet was opening new possibilities for authors, booksellers and regional publishers. Dog Pond Press used those possibilities to offer inexpensive publishing services and sell books online, but its most enduring accomplishment was helping preserve stories rooted in the communities surrounding the Connecticut River.

For readers encountering the domain today, that is the central story of Dog Pond Press: a modest West Springfield publishing venture whose specialized books became lasting pieces of the historical record.