Oddest Book Title Award Announced

Posted on May 10, 2007

The Bookseller magazine has announced the winner of the Oddest Book Title Award. The winner of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize was The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (Harry N. Abrams). The book was written by artist Julian Montague. Julian beat out How Green Were the Nazis? a study of the environmental policies of the Third Reich, in a surprise result.

"Stray Shopping Carts" received a third of the more than 5,500 votes cast by members of the public on the website of trade magazine The Bookseller. "It's a sort of strange honour to have," Montague said. "But I welcome the publicity and it's nice that people are finding out my book exists."

*****

Runner-up for the prize was "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan," by Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie (Bennett & Bloom).

The other finalists were Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: Di Mascio of Coventry: an Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans, by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher and Alan Wilkinson (Past Masters); Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium (Kluwer); and Better Never To Have Been: the Harm of Coming Into Existence, by David Benatar (Clarendon Press).

Past winners of the 29-year-old prize include People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It and How To Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art.

We also were somewhat shocked by the Shopping Carts upset win: our office betting pool was going for Better Never To Have Been: the Harm of Coming Into Existence, which has such a nice, nihilistic ring to it.



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