Cheese beats baboons in odd book contest
A cheese-related book has been awarded a prize for the strangest title, beating off stiff competition from rival publications on knitting, baboons, and stomach gazing.
Bookseller magazine, which presents the annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, says The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-miligram Containers of Fromage Frais, by Professor Philip M. Parker, won by a clear margin, securing 32 percent of votes.
Professor Parker’s study of cheese packaging beat other titles including Baboon Metaphysics, by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth, Curbside Consultation of the Colon by Brooks D. Cash and Mark Hordyszynski’s Strip and Knit with Style.
Announcing the award, Bookseller said Fromage Frais’s prosaic investigation of cheese packaging represented a victory for environmental awareness, and also a change from the usual rather saucy titles that scoop the prize.
“Given that three times in the 21st century the public have crowned somewhat vulgar titles the winner (High Performance Stiffened Structures, Living with Crazy Buttocks and most recently, If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs), I assumed either Strip and Knit with Style or Curbside Consultation of the Colon would pick up the 2008 award,” says Bookseller prize custodian Horace Bent.
“But I’m thrilled the public steered clear of smut and bestowed the “odd title” prize on Professor Parker’s worthy winner.”
But Parker’s victory is not without controversy. The book is one of 200,000 the professor has published using computers to compile data, a technique that has made him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet,” according to the New York Times.