Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year

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Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year

The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, also known as the Diagram Prize, is a humorous literary award

Literary award

A literary award is an award presented to an author who has written a particularly lauded piece or body of work. There are awards for forms of writing ranging from poetry to novels....
that is given to the book with the oddest title. The award was created by publisher Bruce Robertson to provide entertainment during the Frankfurt Book Fair

Frankfurt Book Fair

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world's largest trade fair for books, based on the number of publishing companies represented. It is held annually in mid-October in Frankfurt, Germany....
in 1978

1978 in literature

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Encyclopedia

The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, also known as the Diagram Prize, is a humorous literary award

Literary award

Frankfurt Book Fair

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world's largest trade fair for books, based on the number of publishing companies represented. It is held annually in mid-October in Frankfurt, Germany....
in 1978

1978 in literature

The year 1978 in literature involved some significant events and new books....
. The following year, the award was organised by Horace Bent, the diarist of British literary magazine The Bookseller.

Nominees are selected from submissions sent in by librarians, publishers, and booksellers, although people cannot select books they publish themselves. However, since 1993, readers of The Bookseller have been allowed to nominate titles. Titles which are deliberately designed to be funny are normally rejected. The winner was originally voted for by a panel of judges, but since 2000 the winner was voted for by members of the public via the Internet. Bent resisted this move and threatened to resign, but he later changed his mind and now creates the short list of finalists. There have been two occasions, in 1987 and 1991, in which no award was presented because Bent felt no title was odd enough to win.

The first winner of the prize was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, published by the University of Tokyo Press

University of Tokyo Press

The is a university press affiliated with the University of Tokyo in Japan. It was founded in 1951, following the post-World War II reorganization of the university....
. It was voted having the oddest title of fifteen previous winners and was given a special award marking the award's 15th anniversary. A similar award marking the 30th anniversary was given to the 1996 winner, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers
Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers

Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers is a book edited by Derek Willan and published by the Hellenic Philatelic Society of Great Britain in 1994 in literature....
, edited by Derek Willan. The latest winner was If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs by Big Boom. Voting for the 2008 award is currently underway.

The prize is either a magnum of champagne or a bottle of claret

Claret

Claret is a name used in English language, primarily in United Kingdom, for red wine from the Bordeaux wine region of France....
and increased publicity for both the book and its author. A book that covers the Diagram Prize called How to Avoid Huge Ships and Other Implausibly Titled Books was published on 1 September 2008.

Diagram of Diagrams

Two special anniversary awards known as the "Diagram of Diagrams" have been presented to honour both the 15th and the 30th anniversaries of the Diagram Prize. The nominations of the prizes were all of the previous winners up to that point in time. In 1993, the winner of the 15th anniversary award was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, the winner of the first Diagram Prize.

In 2008, the second "Diagram of Diagrams" award was presented in honour of the 30th anniversary of the Diagram Prize. The winner announced on 5 September 2008 was Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, the 1996 winner.

Past winners

The following is a list of previous winners of the award.

Year	Title	Author/Editor	Publisher
1978	Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice	Various authors	University of Tokyo Press
1979	The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution	Barbara Sherman Heyl	Transaction Press
1980	The Joy of Chickens	Dennis Nolan	Prentice Hall Prentice Hall Prentice Hall is a leading educational publisher. It is an imprint of Pearson Education, Inc., based in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, United States....
1981	Last Chance at Love - Terminal Romances	Various authors	Pinnacle Press
1982	Population and Other Problems: Family Planning, Housing 1,000 million, Labour Employment	Various authors	China National Publications
1983	The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling	A. I. Tselikov, G. S. Nikitin and S. E. Rokotyan	Mir Publishers Mir Publishers Mir Publishers was a major publishing house in the Soviet Union which continues to exist in modern Russian Federation. It was established in 1946 by a decree of the USSR Council of Ministers and headquartered in Moscow, Russia since then....
1984	The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History, and Its Role in the World Today	Anne Wilson	Constable
1985	Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts	Donald L. Wilson	Westwood Publishing Company
1986	Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality	Glenn C. Ellenbogen	Brunner/Mazel
1987	No Award
1988	Versailles: The View From Sweden	Elaine Dee and Guy Walton	University of Chicago Press University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of advanced monographs in the academic field...
1989	How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art	Kathleen Meyer	Ten Speed Press Ten Speed Press Ten Speed Press is a publishing house founded in Berkeley, California, California in 1970. Philip Wood, founder and publisher, began his career with Barnes & Noble in 1962 and in 1965 at Penguin books....
1990	Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual	Pat Califia Patrick Califia Patrick Califia , born 1954 near Corpus Christi, Texas is a writer of nonfiction essays about human sexuality and of erotic fiction and poetry. Califia is a bisexuality transman....	Lace Publications
1991	No Award
1992	How to Avoid Huge Ships	John W. Trimmer	Cornwell Maritime Press
1993	American Bottom Archaeology	Charles J. Bareis and James W. Porter	University of Illinois Press University of Illinois Press The University of Illinois Press , is a major United States university press and part of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign....
1994	Highlights in the History of Concrete	C. C. Stanley	British Cement Association
1995	Reusing Old Graves: A Report on Popular British Attitudes	Douglas Davies Douglas Davies Douglas James Davies is Professor in the Study of Religion in the Department of Theology and Religion at the Durham University. He is an authority in the history, theology and sociology of death.... and Alastair Shaw	Shaw & Son
1996	Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers	Derek Willan	Hellenic Philatelic Society
1997	The Joy of Sex The Joy of Sex *The Joy of Sex* was an illustrated sex manual by Alex Comfort, M.D., Ph.D., first published in 1972. An updated edition was released in September, 2008.... , the Pocket Edition	Alex Comfort Alex Comfort Alexander Comfort was a medical professional, gerontologist, anarchist, pacifism, conscientious objector and writer, best known for The Joy of Sex, which played a part in what is often called the Sexual revolution#The Nonfiction Sex Manuals....	Mitchell Beazley
1998	Developments in Dairy Cow Breeding: New Opportunities to Widen the Use of Straw	Gareth Williams	Nuffield Farming Scholarship Trust
1999	Weeds in a Changing World: British Crop Protection Council Symposium Proceedings No. 64	Charles H. Stirton	British Crop Protection Council
2000	High Performance Stiffened Structures	IMechE (Institution of Mechanical Engineers Institution of Mechanical Engineers The Institution of Mechanical Engineers is the United Kingdom engineering society concerned with mechanical engineering. It is licensed by the Engineering Council UK to assess candidates for inclusion on Engineering Council UK's Register of professional Engineers.... )	Professional Engineering Publishing
2001	Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service	Gerard Forlin	Butterworths
2002	Living with Crazy Buttocks	Kaz Cooke Kaz Cooke Kaz Cooke is an Australian author and cartoonist. Her books include Real Gorgeous, Up the Duff , Kidwrangling, Girl Stuff and Living with Crazy Buttocks, which won the 2002 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year....	Penguin US/Australia Penguin Books Penguin Books is a United Kingdom publisher founded in 1935 by Allen Lane. Lane's idea was to provide quality writing cheaply, for the same price as a pack of cigarettes....
2003	The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories	Alisa Surkis and Monica Nolan	Kensington Publishing
2004	Bombproof Your Horse	Rick Pelicano and Lauren Tjaden	J A Allen
2005	People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It	Gary Leon Hill	Red Wheel/Weiser Books
2006	The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification	Julian Montague	Harry N Abrams
2007	If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs	Big Boom	Simon & Schuster US

Current nominations

Voting for the 2008 Diagram Prize began on 20 February 2009 and will end on 27 March 2009. The nominees are:

Baboon Metaphysics by 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
Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press is a printer and publisher granted a Royal Letters Patent by Henry VIII of England in 1534. It is the world's oldest continually operating book publisher....
).
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
Philip M. Parker

Philip M. Parker holds the INSEAD Chair Professorship of Management Science at INSEAD . He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is filled with data from database and internet searches....
(Icon Group International).

External links

BBC story covering 2006 awards.