With names such as, Curbside Consultation of the Colon and Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring, it is a wonder they will sell at all.But they have been picked by The Bookseller Magazine for a shortlist of the strangest book titles published this year.
Previous winners of the accolade, run by The Bookseller magazine, include Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality, How to Avoid Huge Ships and Highlights in the History of Concrete.
Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year was devised in 1978 by Bruce Robertson from The Diagram Group, the illustrators, when he was bored at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
A huge number of entries has been received this year and the debate was furious as to which would be included on the shortlist. Six seems such a cruelly low number given titles such as Excrement in the Late Middle Ages and All Dogs Have ADHD were rejected.
A few titles also had to be excluded because they were published before 2008 - Monumental Beginnings: Archaeology of the N4 Sligo Inner Relief Road and one of my personal favourites, Sketches of Hull Authors.
The winner of the 2008 award will be chosen by an internet vote at http://www.thebookseller.com and will be announced on March 27, 2009.
The shortlisted titles are:
* Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy 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)
* 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 (Icon Group International)
