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Here was the shortlist:
- How Green Were the Nazis?
- Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium
- Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence
- D. Di Mascio’s Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans
- The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
- Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan
The prize, of course, was The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, awarded annually since 1978 by British magazine The Bookseller. Past winners include Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (1978), How to Sh*t in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art (1989), How to Avoid Huge Ships (1992), and People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It (2005).
As you may have guessed from the photo, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America brought home the statue last month.
Now is the part where I ask you to leave a comment with the most obscure, hilarious, awful or brilliant book title you’ve ever seen. Make us proud; make us laugh.
A friend of mine has a very important looking book titled, “Everything Men Know About Women”. When you open it though, all the pages are blank.
I’ve also seen Monty Pythons “Big Red Book”, which is blue, not red.
Another title I like is from another joke/humor book called “How to Mutate and Take Over the World”.
posted by Jason! on 5-14-2007 at 10:10 am
I used to work in a public library, so I saw my fair share of strange titles. I think my favorite was “Contemplating Your Bellybutton.”
I think it was a translation to English, though, so that’s probably part of the strange title. It just cracked me up every time I saw it.
posted by Janel on 5-14-2007 at 11:56 pm