Thursday, May 14, 2009

More culture in a pot of yoghurt?

My old friend Horace Bent, who writes a similar column to this one in the UK’s Bookseller magazine, has announced the winners of the annual Diagram Prize for the year’s oddest book title. The 2009 winner is The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Professor Philip M Parker (Icon Group International). The title received 32% of the 5000+ votes cast at the Bookseller’s website. The runner-up, with 22% of the votes, was Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M Seyfarth (University of Chicago Press). Also in contention were Curbside Consultation of the Colon by Brooks D Cash (SLACK Incorporated), Strip and Knit with Style by Mark Hordyszynski (C & T), The Large Sieve and Its Applications by Emmanuel Kowalski (Cambridge University Press) and Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring by Lietai Yang (Woodhead). Dear readers, can you think of any locally published titles that we might want to nominate next year?

1 comment:

Kylez..aka...Mrs.P! said...

Hi Gladys,
I don't know any locally published titles you could add to the list, but I work for a book importer and some of the books our publishers print are ridiculous...some so obscure they are hilarious! My personal favs are "The Crochet Dude's Designs for Guys" and "Peat and Peat Cutting", about, you guessed it...Peat! Not exactly best-sellers!