Oddity Book Titles Vie for Top Prize

March 10, 2007 — -- Sometimes it's best to judge a book by its cover.

At least, that's what editors at the British magazine The Bookseller believe.

For the last 29 years, The Bookseller has invited publishers, bookstore owners and librarians to submit their choices for the oddest book title of the year. The choices are then published on the magazine's Web site where readers are asked to vote for their favorite title.

The only requirement? There are two, actually -- the book must be a work of nonfiction, and its title must be ridiculous.

Just how ridiculous?

Last year's winner was a book called "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. It's a guide to counseling dead spirits who just can't seem to shake off their desire to live on, often in bodies that don't belong to them.

In an interview with ABCNews.com, The Bookseller's deputy editor, Joel Rickett, said that "the origins of this award are shrouded in the mists of time. Despite years of searching, I haven't been able to figure out quite how it came to be."

Whatever the story behind these awards, one thing is clear -- the rewards are definitely not financial. As Rickett put it, "There's no cash prize, only the prestige of winning such a special prize. People love an obscure title!"

But the nominated books are not always as strange as their titles might suggest.

One of last year's nominees, "Ancient Starch Research," is actually an academic tome on plant archaeology, a subject not usually given over to belly laughs.

The book's California publisher, Mitch Allen of Left Coast Press Inc., said, "We were very amused to hear of the nomination. We plan to publish books with equally odd titles in the future. I only wish we had published the book with the winning title as well!"

The book's distributors, Berg Publishers, were equally thrilled about the nomination."We would have loved to win," said Berg's sales and marketing manager, Veruschka Selbach. "We spend so much time devising the perfect title, and when it's noticed -- even if for its oddness, it's a great thing."

But both Selbach and Allen acknowledged that the attention made no discernable impact on the book's sales. "It is an awfully strange title to some, but I don't think people buy a book for its title," said Selbach. "They buy it for the content. These awards sell The Bookseller but not the nominated books."

Despite Rickett's claim that "the awards bring a niche book to a wider audience," it's hard to imagine people actually buying up stock of this year's nominees, hilarious though some of the titles are.

There are a few academic contenders, beginning with a book called "How Green Were the Nazis," which examines the environmental policies of the Third Reich.

Then, there's "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." As this humdinger of a title painstakingly explains, this is a history of ice-cream makers in the English city of Coventry.

From ice cream in Coventry to tattoos in the Islamic Russian Republic of Daghestan, "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan" is an illustrated book that looks at tattoo designs and decoration on the women and spoon boxes of the remote republic.

But the dubious honor of being the most academic nominee in 2007 belongs to "Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium," which has no less than four editors sharing credit for the 474-page tome.

If all of this sounds too educational, the list also has a couple of choices that should satisfy one's craving for the bizarre.

Shopping cart enthusiasts will no doubt be encouraged to read "The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification." According to its publishers, "This field guide introduces a groundbreaking classification system for abandoned shopping carts" and studies "the complex relationship between cart and landscape."

The final nomination belongs to a philosophical study with the eyecatching title "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence." Its premise holds that one could avoid "serious harm" by never "coming into existence."

It's rather late in the day for such advice, one might say, but perhaps not too late for its author to win The Bookseller/ Diagram prize for oddest book title of the year. Interested readers can cast their vote on www.thebookseller.com. The winner will be revealed Friday, April 13, on the eve of the London Book Fair.

And for those wishing to place bets, the most recent figures show the shopping cart field guide in the lead with a third of the vote.