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Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Books Introducing the Nominees for the Best Book Award of the Year

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 3:20 PM

Slog tipper Sophie alerts us to the shortlist for the Diagram Prize for the world's most bizarre book titles:

Cooking with Poo and Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World are just two of the bizarre books up for the prize of the oddest book title of the year...alongside The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria by Scott D Mendelson, which details the 'Koro' psychiatric epidemic that hit the island of Singapore in 1967.

Mr Andoh's Pennine Diary Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge by Stephen Curry and Takayoshi Andoh is also in the running for the odd accolade.

The Telegraph lists several past prize-winners: "Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships and Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way."

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Awesome. Like the Bulwer-Lytton contest, but for the titles of real books.

Posted by Matt from Denver on February 28, 2012 at 3:39 PM

How To Avoid Huge Ships is perhaps the classic of the genre. Somewhere I have a book full of these; A Popular History of British Seaweeds, Something New In Sandwiches, Why She Should Start Wearing a Bra: The Importance of the Bra for the Young Teenager, A History of the Canterbury Frozen Meat Company Limited, 1882-1957, and one of my favorites Understand Your Tortoise. You really have to go to England if you want to get crazy.

Posted by Fnarf

on February 28, 2012 at 3:58 PM

Here's a sailing forum where they start off ridiculing How to Avoid Huge Ships. Then they argue for 14 pages about how, exactly, to avoid huge ships. So I guess it's not all that obvious after all.

Posted by EricJ on February 28, 2012 at 4:58 PM

Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way:
So, you get a few other dentists to work for you, establish one big mega-dental clinic, and become the most respected dentist in the land. Split up your clinic into four branches and have your four sons each manage one of them, but force them to share their patients so that the practice stays together more or less. Allow everything to go to hell after you die due to infighting over who gets which patients.

Posted by venomlash on February 29, 2012 at 2:16 AM