The Best of the Worst
Ever wondered what the most ridiculous book titles this year are? So have the folks at The Bookseller. The idea started with Bruce Robertson, the founder of the The Diagram Group according to www.thebookseller.com
[Robertson] suggested that some of the boredom of the Frankfurt Book Fair(the largest trade fair for literature in the world :::yawn:::) could be abolished (hurrah!) if one traversed its many, many, many, aisles in search of oddly-titled books.
Doesn’t that sound like a fun job? There were pretty strict rules to the submissions, though:
any book discovered at the fair could be submitted for the award (which was then known as the Diagram Group Prize for the Oddest Title at the Frankfurt Book Fair), with the only proviso that publishers could not submit their own works. A panel of judges decided the winner—a panel that I was privileged to become chairman of back in ’82…
Currently:
…Spotters and judges and voters are actively discouraged from reading the texts in question, for fear that becoming too close to the work may cloud their judgement in declaring the text’s title “odd”…
Other minor considerations when judging over the years have included: “writers’ ignorance” (is the title purposefully funny? If so, we can’t have it. Unintentional oddness is what we’re after);“vanity presses” (ditto—books should be professionally published. It would be too easy to bash out a quick book and stick it on Scribd with a title like: “The jellyfish of Redcar’s car-parks” ); and “whether or not publisher of nominated book has taken me out for lunch in the past 12 months”
Apparently there was a snag in the late 80s and early 90s, which caused the prize not to be awarded. Namely, nobody could find any decent entries. Thus, the Diagram Prize was opened to the general literary market and today, 32 years after the prize was created, any book is up for submission–twitter entries are also now the norm! This year apparently they have had a record number of submissions. The following are some of the quirkiest titles from the original list of 90 titles:
- Mickey Mouse, Hitler and Nazi Germany
- Peek-a-poo: What’s in Your Nappy?
- Father Christmas Needs a Wee
- Fluffy Little Kitten in Fluffy’s Brother
- The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease
- The Wild World of Girly Men and Masculine Women – And Why Americans Suffer from So Many Other Idiotic Syndromes!
- Obama Guilty of Being President While Black
- Is the Rectum a Grave?
I’m not sure what the publishers were thinking when they greenlit these titles. I’m not sure how comfortable I’d feel sitting at a cafe reading a book with Hitler in Mickey Mouse ears on the title. As well intentioned and academic the contents might be, the whole cover is just a cruel joke to the reader. It says, “Come and give me a beat down.”
You can read the rest of the titles here and see the shortlist here. The winner will be announced March 29th.
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