Oddest book title of the year
The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais has won The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year for 2008. News:Lite has the details:
Weirdly the book does not have a living author but is the product of an automated authoring invention by Professor Philip M Parker, which produces titles based on database searches.
The niche book sells for a whopping £795 begging the question – “Why do people who care about Fromage Frais containers have so much money?” Philip Stone, of The Bookseller, said: “[The book] is a fitting champion given that today’s public are more aware of green issues than ever. It highlights an area that, perhaps, we are all guilty of ignoring as we push our trolleys down supermarket aisles”.
Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M Seyfarth’s Baboon Metaphysics and Brooks D Cash’s Curbside Consultation of the Colon finished second and third with a 22% and 18% share of the vote respectively.
In fourth place was Mark Hordyszynski’s Strip and Knit with Style, followed by Emmanuel Kowalski’s The Large Sieve and its Applications and Lietai Yang’s Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring.
As the translator of Frozen Coagulated Cultures in Wine, Cheese, and Sauerkraut Production (my first book-length translation, back in my brief technical translating period many years ago), I don’t see what’s so odd about this title!
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Posted: April 2nd, 2009 under offbeat.
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