bombproof your horse

Last week the shortlist of contestants in the Oddest Book Title of the Year award came out. The books are a) How Green Were the Nazis?; b) Di Mascio’s Delicious Ice Cream: Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans; c) The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification; c) Tatooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan; e) Proceedings of the 18th Annual Seaweed Symposium; and e) Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.

You can vote in a poll for your favorite here.

Here are the previous winners. You got a favourite? I think mine is “Living with Crazy Buttocks,” but “The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling” seems an essential read.

Diagram Prize Winners
• 2005 People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
• 2004 Bombproof Your Horse
• 2003 The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories
• 2002 Living with Crazy Buttocks
• 2001 Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service
• 2000 High Performance Stiffened Structures
• 1999 Weeds in a Changing World
• 1998 Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw
• 1997 The Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition
• 1996 Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers
• 1995 Reusing Old Graves
• 1994 Highlights in the History of Concrete
• 1993 American Bottom Archaeology
• 1992 How to Avoid Huge Ships
• 1990 Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual
• 1989 How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art
• 1988 Versailles: The View from Sweden
• 1986 Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality
• 1985 Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts
• 1984 The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today
• 1983 The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling