WWTBAM Bored

nitrah55 wrote:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/books ... st.html?hp

This year's winner for the weirdest book title.

The work beat out stiff competition from the four actual books on the shortlist: “Curbside Consultation of the Colon,” “The Large Sieve and Its Applications,” “Strip and Knit With Style” and “Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring.”

The Diagram Prize began in 1978 as a way for Bruce Robertson, co-founder of the Diagram Group, an information and graphics company, to combat his ennui at the Frankfurt Book Fair. That was a bumper year for odd titles — nominees included “100 Years of British Retail Catering” and “50 New Poodle Grooming Styles” — but the runaway winner was “Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Nude Mice.”

“How to Avoid Huge Ships,” in which an old sea captain offers shipping-lane safety tips to pleasure-boat sailors, has a select but fervent following and late Thursday was ranked No. 1,381,925 on Amazon.com.

“This is a must-read for anyone who encounters huge ships daily and does not want to get run over by them,” one reader says on the Amazon Web site. Another raves: “I never leave the house without this indispensable little book. It has literally saved my life many times while walking down Peckham High Street and Ealing Broadway.”