In case you missed it, the winner of the prestigious Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year has been chosen. Drumroll, please. It is Daina Taimina’s Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes. No doubt you are as surprised as I that Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots and Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter did not even make the top three.
The odd Oddest prize goes back more than 30 years, when Bruce Robertson, founder of The Diagram Group (a “publishing solutions firm”), came up with the idea as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The prize is administered by The Bookseller, a leading business magazine for the book industry and web site that provides daily news and comment about the book business.
Bookseller “diarist” Horace Bent had worried that oddly-titled books would suffer in tough economic times, but was delighted that “oddity endured.”
I find the whole contest amusing, especially the part about it being conceived as a way to avoid boredom!
