And the prize for the oddest book title goes to…

Would you be tempted to read “Highlights in the History of Concrete”? If not, the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year offers other highlights. Such as the 2017 winner, “The Commuter Pig Keeper: A Comprehensive Guide to Keeping Pigs When Time is Your Most Precious Commodity”. Some of its winners offer solutions to universal problems, such as timekeeping, others to problems that you perhaps didn’t know you have, such as the invaluable “How to Avoid Huge Ships” (1992). Yet other titles have a more opaque aim, such as 1993’s winning—and frankly mystifying—“American Bottom Archaeology”. And a few are simply odd: this year’s pick, announced on December 6th, is “The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire”.The literary world has many august prizes—the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Baillie Gifford. The Diagram prize is not one of them. Booker victors win tens of thousands of readers and pounds and international fame. Winning titles such as “Wolf Hall” and “The Remains of the Day” are to this day household names. Diagram authors, by contrast, win nothing at all, do not become famous, while its winning and shortlisted titles—such as “Reusing Old Graves: A Report on Popular British Attitudes”, “Waterproofing Your Child” and “Strip and Knit With Style”—tend to languish in obscurity.The prize dates to the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1978. This is the oldest and most venerable in the publishing calendar. It was also, felt a literary designer called Bruce Robertson, very boring. To alleviate the dullness, he started to scour its aisles not for the best books but for those with the silliest titles. The prize—named after his company—was born. It has run ever since, bringing almost no recognition at all to titles such as “The Large Sieve and Its Applications” and that little-read thriller, “Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers”.The prize has stringent and eccentric rules. Titles cannot be intentionally funny: they must have been given in a serious, even “po-faced” way, says Horace Bent, the prize’s pseudonymous administrator at the, a British magazine that covers the publishing industry. And while almost no literary judges read all the books they are supposed to, Diagram judges are “actively discouraged”, says the , from reading nominees lest this “cloud their judgment” and they become unable to see the titles as “odd”. Rightly: doubtless the many lawyers who worked on the winner of 2001 saw nothing remotely amusing in titling a book “Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service”. Or indeed in its even blunter sequel: “Butterworths Corporate Killing Service”.Like all good literature, many of the Diagram prize’s winners might make you smile but they also make you think. Read 1984’s winner, “The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today”, and the questions crowd in. Such as: what can the antecedents of marmalade possibly be? (Jam? Oranges?) And: how many different roles can marmalade really have? And above all: who on earth is buying this stuff? Others have more obvious utility: beneath the “How to Avoid Huge Ships” title, Amazon offers a satisfied review from “an iceberg”.The prize is a rare survival in a publishing industry that itself has become a little more po-faced of late. Awards such as “The Hatchet Job of the Year” and the ’s “Bad Sex in Fiction Award” have both been discontinued: the said that people had suffered enough in 2020 without “bad sex as well”. The Diagram is aware it can ruffle feathers: some relish their nominations. Others, says Mr Bent, “do not like it at all”.Readers can be pleased that it has persisted. Not least because winners demonstrate many valuable literary lessons. Such as the power of a well-chosen adjective. The 1972 bestseller “The Joy of Sex” today seems like a quaint, almost wholesome volume. But add qualifiers, as 1997’s “The Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition” did, and you have an instantly more ominous prospect.All offer a lesson in how English works; in that almost unintended alchemy that occurs between author and reader. Dylan Thomas once wrote that “the magic in a poem is always accidental”; it creeps in in the unintended gaps between the author and the words and the reader. And what is true of poetry is also, surely, true of “American Bottom Archaeology”.