March 21, 2014

"The Bookseller" is a British trade publication. A prize they have annually awarded, since 1978, is called the "Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year." The winner in 2014 is announced on March 21. And since this post was not written today, we are not sure which of the following nominated titles will be the winning one:

How to Poo on a Date, by Mats and Enzo

Working Class Cats: The Bodega Cats of New York City, by Chris Balsiger and Erin Canning

Pie-ography: Where Pie Meets Biography, by Jo Packham

How to Pray When You're Pissed at God, by Ian Punnett

The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us about Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society, by David Walter-Toews

Are Trout South African?: Stories of Fish, People and Places, by Duncan Brown

According to the Bookseller website:

The prize was originally conceived in 1978 by Trevor Bounford, co-founder with Bruce Robertson of publishing solutions firm The Diagram Group, as a way of avoiding boredom at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. It has been administered every year by The Bookseller and Horace Bent, the magazine's diarist.

Bent said: "I believe my fellow judges and I—after much discussion and robust debate that quite frankly often threatened to descend into fisticuffs—have come up with one of the strongest shortlists in The Diagram Prize’s over three-and-a-half decade history.
He added: “It is a truly inspiring list celebrating the art of title-making that goes from the sublime to the fantastic. It runs the gamut from a book with a Darwinian pun and a very liberal sprinkling of the S-bomb within its pages, to a title that hints at the heretofore unreported class struggle amongst the moggies of the Big Apple. ”


I frankly find none of the above odd, and only that Origin of Feces title, sounds interesting to read. (Okay, I would pick up that Pie-ography book). So why give them a blog post. It IS interesting to me, what other people find, odd.

And here is one example: