Water-cooler talk

Chicken-coop manual takes odd-title award

Saturday March 23, 2013 10:06 AM

LONDON — A book offering advice on how to protect chicken coops from goblins has won the Oddest Book Title of the Year award, contest organizers said yesterday.

Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop by Reginald Bakeley attracted 38 percent of 1,225 online votes to beat the craft manual How Tea Cosies Changed the World, with 31 percent, for the 35th annual Diagram Prize.

Third place went to God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis by Tom Hickman.

Despite the seeming silliness, publishers and booksellers know that a title might make all the difference in the sales of a book, said Philip Stone, coordinator of the prize — run by the industry publication The Bookseller.

“It spotlights an undervalued art that can make or break a work of literature,” Stone said.

He cited books such as A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as owing some of their success to odd titles.

“The kind of niche, offbeat publications that often appear on the Diagram Prize shortlist might not make their writers or publishers rich beyond their wildest dreams,” Stone said, “but the fact writers still passionately write such works and publishers are still willing to invest in them is a marvelous thing that deserves to be celebrated.”

The Diagram Prize was founded at the Frankfurt (Germany) Book Fair in 1978. Past winners include Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice and last year’s Cooking With Poo, a Thai cookbook by Bangkok resident Saiyuud Diwong, whose nickname is Poo.

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