This is such a great contest: The Diagram Prize‘s Oddest Book Title of the Year. Its 2009 winner is The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-miligram Containers of Fromage Frais.
I’m sure you are wondering, how could that possibly have beat out Baboon Metaphysics (#2) and Curbside Consultation of the Colon (#3)? Such is the nature of the wonderfully whimsical contest, now in its 31st year after being conceived by The Diagram Group’s Bruce Robertson as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The Bookseller posted a short list of six books vying for the prestigious title, receiving just over 5,000 votes in an online poll to come up with the winner. “Six seems such a cruelly low number given titles such as Excrement in the Late Middle Ages and All Dogs Have ADHD were rejected,” said Philip Stone, a sales analyst at The Bookseller.
He added that The Diagram Prize “celebrates the diversity within book publishing today, the risks publishers are willing to take to support freedom of information, the beauty of print-on-demand for fascinatingly niche titles, and perhaps most of all, complete and utter oddity.”
(Thanks to Gloria for reminding me to blog about this.)