Danger Sound Klaxon! picks up the Diagram Prize gong

Sound the trumpets, folks, ring the bells and most importantly crank up that old-fashioned noisemaker that goes “a-rooo-gha” for Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History has blown away the competition to win the 45th The Bookseller Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.

The book, in which author Matthew F Jordan charts the “meteoric rise and eventual fall” of the klaxon automobile horn, never fell out of the love with Diagramistas: it garnered 53% of the ballot, the greatest share since the award went to a public vote in 2000, and joins Is Superman Circumcised? (2022), The Joy of Waterboiling (2018) and Cooking with Poo (2011) as the only winners to ever grab a full majority of votes.

There is something of a wholesomeness to this year’s winner as voters have turned away from the slightly naughty and/or scatological tone of recent winners such as the aforementioned Is Superman Circumcised?, plus 2020’s A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in Eastern Indonesian Society and 2019’s The Dirt Hole and its Variations. And there were certainly those kinds of options to choose from on the 2023 shortlist, but Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze was a distant second, while early bookies’ favourite I Fart in Your General Direction: Flatulence in Popular Culture barely caused a stink with voters.

Maybe it was a search for some sort of cosy nostalgia in this grim autumn that rang true with the public as Danger Sound Klaxon! is something of a throwback, harkening to that run 20 to 30 years ago when niche academic areas of study twinned with industrial mass production ruled the Diagram with the likes of 1994’s Highlights in the History of Concrete, American Bottom Archaeology from the next year, and the first winner of the millennium, Designing High Performance Stiffened Structures.

But maybe it has been a huge change in voter demographics as Dixieland has suddenly and head-scratchingly become the Diagram stronghold. With Danger Sound Klaxon! published by the University of Virginia Press the Diagram crown remains in the American South for a third consecutive year after North Carolina academic McFarland & Company bagged the previous two gongs. Plus, five of the six nominees this year were released by Southern US academic houses: a brace from UVP (the winner and The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century); another duo from McFarland (I Fart In Your General Direction and The 12 Days of Christmas: The Outlaw Carol that Wouldn’t Die); and the University of Georgia Press-published Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau.

Of course, there is no award for the winning author or publisher, barring the adulation of millions and spike in book sales. Traditionally, a passable bottle of claret is bestowed on the nominator of the winning title. But, Danger Sound Klaxon! was put forward by yours truly who spotted the book at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. So, I shall have The Bookseller’s in-house sommelier bring the vino back to the cellar and next year’s successful nominator… drum roll… will receive two bottles. So keep your eyes peeled for odd titles, and tell me when you do.