Monday, February 23, 2009

I’m voting for Fromage Frais

The Bookseller reports that culling entries for its annual Diagram prize for oddest book title of the year was difficult this time:
“We received a huge number of entries this year and the debate was furious as to which would be included on the shortlist. Six seems such a cruelly low number given titles such as Excrement in the Late Middle Ages and All Dogs Have ADHD were rejected,” said charts editor Philip Stone. “We also had to exclude a few titles because they were published before 2008 – Monumental Beginnings: Archaeology of the N4 Sligo Inner Relief Road and one of my personal favourites, Sketches of Hull Authors. The latter was first published back in 1879, but thanks to print on demand – the wonderful saviour of out-of-print books – you can still purchase copies to this day.”

The prize was established in 1978, when it was won by Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. This year’s winner will be decided by a public vote at www.thebookseller.com, and will be announced on 27 March.
The shortlist is:
Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M Seyfarth (University of Chicago Press)
Curbside Consultation of the Colon by Brooks D Cash (SLACK Incorporated)
The Large Sieve and its Applications by Emmanuel Kowalski (Cambridge University Press)
Strip and Knit with Style by Mark Hordyszynski (C&T)
Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring by Lietai Yang (Woodhead)
The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Professor Philip M Parker (Icon Group International)

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