It’s that time of year again: forget the Man Booker, the Diagram Prize is my favourite book award of them all.
The prize celebrates the Oddest Book Title of the Year, and the first winner, back in 1978 is still one of my favourites: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.
The Bookseller (‘the organ of the book trade’) has invited nominations for this year’s award: ideally titles that have no awareness of just how odd they are, because that’s much funnier.
Here are some previous winners, to give you a flavour of just how wonderful this is: from innuendo (Designing High Performance Stiffened Structuresin 2000), and who could forget Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes in 2009? But my personal favourite is from 2002: Living with Crazy Buttocks.
They don’t make ’em like the used to.