News

« Headlines

Green Nazis and Tattooed Mountain Women compete for Oddest Titles prize

09.03.07 Joel Rickett

The Bookseller magazine today reveals the shortlist for The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. The six titles are: How Green Were the Nazis?, edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller (Ohio University Press), 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 by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson (Past Masters), The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague (Harry N Abrams), Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan, by Robert Chenciner by Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie (Bennett & Bloom), Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium, edited by Robert J Anderson, Juliet A Brodie, Edvar Onsoyen and Alan T Critchley (Kluwer) and Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar (Clarendon Press).

An online poll to find the winner is now open at www.thebookseller.com, and the winner will be revealed on Friday 13th April on the eve of the London Book Fair. Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, said: “While rival literary awards like the Costas and the Orange Broadband Prize have sold out, The Bookseller/Diagram Prize has refused all offers of corporate sponsorship for 29 years. It continues to celebrate the bizarre, the strange, and the simply odd. This year’s shortlist shows that despite publishers cutting back their lists, literary diversity continues to flourish.”

Three excellent entries were ruled out because they were published before 2006: The Essential Underwater Guide to North Wales Vol 1, Let’s Discover F Words, and Celebrating Boxes. There was also a seminal Chinese book that has yet to find a UK publisher: A General Analysis of the Counting Methods of Chopped Yarrow Stalks in the Book of Changes.

The prize, founded in 1978, honours books from the fringes of publishing. The titles are found and submitted by publishers, booksellers and librarians from around the world. Last year's winner was People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It by Gary Leon Hill (Red Wheel).

Prizes Joel Rickett Diagram Prize

See Also