Waterproofing Your Child

This year's winner of the The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, sponsored by The Bookseller magazine, has just been announced. And the winner is....(requisite drum roll)...The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais. Other finalists for this year's award were Curbside Consultation of the Colon, The Large Sieve and Its Applications, Strip and Knit with Style, Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring, and Baboon Metaphysics.

Not happy about this year's outcome? Be sure to go on line next spring (The Bookseller) and vote! Anyone can nominate a title (except publishers are not allowed to nominate their own books to prevent them from giving books willfully odd names -- I guess The Diagram Prize is a big deal if they have a rule to prevent people from playing the system!), and the public is invited to vote.

Past winners include The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, Reusing Old Graves, How to Avoid Huge Ships, People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About it, and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories. Titles shortlisted in the past but not winning the Big Prize include Waterproofing Your Child, How to Write a How to Write Book, and I was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen.

The Diagram Prize began in 1978. The Diagram Group is an information and graphics company. The Bookseller magazine has been UK's leading business magazine for the book industry since 1858. Judges are discouraged from actually reading any of the nominated titles, because doing so might cloud their judgment.