How Green Were the Nazis? and Proceedings of the 18th International Seaweed Symposium are among the competitors vying for top prize in an annual contest for the oddest book title.
The Bookseller, the U.K.-based publishing industry trade magazine, revealed Friday its short list of six titles contending for this year's 29th annual Bookseller-Diagram Prize.
The other nominees are:
- The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
- Tattooed Mountain Woman and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan
- Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: Di Mascio of Coventry, an Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans
- Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
The annual prize "continues to celebrate the bizarre, the strange and the simply odd," deputy magazine editor Joel Rickett said in a statement.
"This year's short list shows that despite publishers cutting back their lists, literary diversity continues to flourish."
Some excellent but disqualified titles
The magazine also revealed four worthy titles that, unfortunately, were ruled out because they were published before 2006:
- The Essential Underwater Guide to North Wales, Vol. 1
- Let's Discover F Words
- Celebrating Boxes
- A General Analysis of the Counting Methods of Chopped Yarrow Stalks in the Book of Changes
Last year's winner was People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It.
The public is invited to vote for this year's winner on the homepage of the Bookseller website, with the winning title to be announced April 13, on the eve of the London Book Fair.
Founded in 1978, the Bookseller's oddest-title prize typically honours books published in the fringes of the industry. Organizers invite strange and bizarre title submissions from publishers, booksellers and librarians.
With files from the Associated Press
